You see, the implications are too grand. Every piece of good that has been done/ will ever be done in my professional life is erased so many times over by this one world event. The magnitude of the death and destruction is so overwhelming because it is simply too big to be healed. 100,000 deaths have been estimated.
I find myself changing the channel. 'What Not to Wear' or 'Scrubs.' I cannot watch this, because there is absolutely NOTHING that I can do. Awareness? Yes, I am a proponent. Stop Genocide in Africa. Feed The Starving. AIDS Awareness. Yet, quite hypocritically and shamefully, I whine about four ankle surgeries in six months. "How could this happen to me?" I angrily muse, while sitting at home completely cared for.
In an even darker place, there is a little voice doubting being cared for by a God who lets schools collapse on top of children in a country barely recovering from past natural disasters. Will He really care for me if not even these are cared for?
100,000 people. There is nothing, nothing I can do or will ever do that could begin to salvage this kind of wound in a people, a gouging in the flesh of our world.
So I change the channel. I put down my newspaper. I find myself deliberately locking away that portion of my heart, like amputating dead flesh that would kill the body if allowed to continue in the raw. Because with something so devastating raw and exposed, how can anything else matter, ever, compared to this one event?
I have never been good at compartmentalizing, how can I give myself permission to enjoy the aroma of coffee or the thought of Arizona-- when the people are suffering now? Nothing could be significant again, and I do not believe this is right.
100,000 people. Every person you have every known, your entire town, everyone you have ever met and loved and everyone each of them has known and loved. All of their potential, their children, their grandchildren. The meals they would make at holidays, the words and symphonies they could have created, their choices and learning and potential to cure disease, the poetry and art we have lost. The kind words of 100,000 people that would have been spoken. The future of an entire people, and the carving and missing in the lives of the survivors of their dear ones.
We should mourn for the loss of these.
