It seems very difficult for most people, myself included, to connect with the scale of the tragedy in south-east Asia. When 10 people die in a rail crash in the West, it’s called a tragedy. Of course, any loss of human life through accident or “Act of God” is tragic. It’s sad. The problem of language is that it there is not the adjective that would escalate the word “tragedy” into anything that could encompass the sheer scale of human loss.
When a person dies, it’s a tragedy. When a hundred thousand die, it’s a statistic.
To put it into some kind of perspective, the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed about the same number of people as the earthquake off Indonesia.
I don’t have the words myself. Where words fail, pictures convey. Have a look at the following satellite images of the coast of Sri Lanka before and after the tsunami hit.
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de 12.30.04 at 3:28 am
A number of scientists apparently saw the reports of a tsunami hitting Sumatra, did the maths to work out that it would hit Sri Lanka in 3 hours time, then went to bed. In case you think that was a bit thoughtless, who exactly would you ring?
By the way, notice how hard it is to dispose of bodies. In the worst hit areas, tens of hundreds of bodies cannot be buried before rotting, even with funeral pyres. This should give you renewed respect for Nazi efficiency.