This has come in from one of our readers,
We’d been wondering how to say something about Japan and so numbed by the scale of it we could find no word to start.
We have also been silenced by the thought – that can come nowhere near understanding – that, of all the countries in the world, the very notion of radiation must be a visceral nightmare to Japan,
So we’re glad for our reader to speak – and to link to three major appeals to which people may like to donate:
Anne Lavelle says: ‘We are Argyll, yes. We are still connected to the outside world. Japan should break our hearts but all the media can find of interest is (a) effect on stock exchange (b) radiation released on the world.
‘People are starving, cold, waterless and shelterless. Media focusses on radiation.
‘There was a story once of a woman who had lost her entire family, her house, her livelihood. She was stoic until she was told her calf had died. Then she broke down. It’s the small things…
‘A video was posted today, of a dog found – but not rescued – by a TV channel.
‘In response, I wrote this:
‘Amidst the wasteland
of man’s hubris
a dog wanders the rubble
‘Searching, perhaps,
for the men who gave him
warmth and food and clean water
and shelter from the world
‘Now the water is stagnant
and there is no warmth
outside in the icy rain.
Snow is coming.
‘How long has he waited
unable to leave;
unwilling to abandon
another lost soul
whose only haven
is the shield of a paw
and a touch
of a cold nose
‘In the aftermath of a human disaster
we often forget
that we are responsible
for many not of our kind
‘The last betrayal:
when Man arrives,
finally,
he does not offer food or warmth or water
but a cold roving eye to beam to the world’.
http://www.truth-out.org/danger-spent-fuel-outweighs-reactor-threat68551
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I see this thread doesn’t have many replies and then I think I realised why. If everyone is like me, then we are all lost for words.
And what words are there?
I see the pictures everyday on Sky News and I hear the numbers of missing and dead (today 16,500) and I simply cannot comprehend the horror of this disaster. The scale is just not something my simple brain can fathom.
What floored me today is that it is only now coming to the 1 week mark – it seems as if this has happened so much longer ago and this is from me on the other side of the world, safe and sound in my home with my family safely here beside me.
God only knows how the Japanese had made it through this week.
My thoughts and my heart are with them.
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For Crazy She-Bat: You’re right. This item has been the most read since it was published – but no one can comment.
We were among the dumbstruck – easy expressions of horror somehow compound the affliction. Then the reader who sent us the comment and the poem gave us a way out.
What has been most moving has been the way the Japanese people, down to each individual, have met this unimaginable awfulness. The depth of their suffering is received internally and the silent civility of their outward behaviour is remarkable. We have heard no screaming, And when inadequate amounts of food have come to halls with huge numbers of starving survivors, they queue with discipline and fairness.
These people are facing a disaster on a scale that simply shuts down imagining. They and their country, in humanity, need all that we can do for them.
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