Insightful commentary on responses to the tsunami tragedy

[Nothing Without Hope]

A philosophical/political take on the various human responses to the tsunami tragedy in a New Yorker editorial by Hendrik Hertzberg, "Flood Tide":
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?050117ta_talk_hertzberg
Excerpt:
(snip)
Yet it is the very “meaninglessness” of the catastrophe—its lack of human agency, its failure to fit into any scheme of human reward and punishment—that has helped make possible the simple solidarity of the global response. President Reagan, to the exasperation of his aides, used to muse that human beings, faced with some mortal threat from beyond the skies, would put aside their differences in common cause. Something like that, on a very modest scale, appears to be happening as the world clamors to help the survivors of the destroyer from beneath the seas. Tsunamis have no politics.

Even so, there were familiar elements in the responses of the Bush Administration. Two days after the disaster, a White House spokesman, asked why President Bush himself had so far remained silent, explained, “He didn’t want to make a symbolic statement about ‘we feel your pain.’” On the third day, the President finally voiced his condolences in person, and two days later the government’s emergency-aid allotment, initially pegged at fifteen million dollars, was raised to three hundred and fifty million, where it remains. On the eighth day, even as Secretary of State Colin Powell, in Thailand, was saying that enough money was at hand, Bush, now back at the White House, appeared side by side with his father, George H. W. Bush (whom he had never before granted such a public role), and his father’s successor, Bill Clinton (the object of his spokesman’s snideness), to announce that he was appointing them to lead a private fund-raising drive in the United States.
(snip)

Also on the subject of tsunami aid, please check out the first-hand account in a letter written by a naval officer stationed aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. He is in the center of frantically-paced efforts to provide relief and help save lives. His account -- written for family and friends and not originally intended for public reading -- is moving and vivid. It is not "military propaganda," it is a window on another facet of the human response to this overwhelming tragedy. It is posted here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2934356

[Nothing Without Hope]

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