In Sorrow

I would like to express my horror and sorrow at the massive natural disaster on the Indian Ocean. Tragic events like this have a tendency, when they are as far-off and abstract as they are for Americans like myself, to provoke bewildered emotions.

The figure of over 100,000 dead is so horrific as to be unimaginable, and this unimaginable nature can either render in our minds as meaningless or reinforce our blackest notions of the pitilessness of nature and, by extension, existence.

It is tragic enough when someone you know dies suddenly and violently, when someone is torn from your world with that very cosmic pitilessness.

When one considers 100, 000 of those tragedies occuring almost at once, one can easily succumb to numbness, the same unimaginable numbness that wars and the Holocaust tend to inspire.

I believe the best thing to do is to bear as much of the weight of that pain as we can, and to do what we can to aid and console the survivors. It is important both to help and to feel the weight of our fellow human's suffering. In the words of Goethe, "A man who is unable to despair has no need to be alive." It is our sensitivity to the suffering and humanness of others that makes us capable of an ethical life.