It’s very surreal feeling so many emotions about something so far away. It’s alienating and strange. I still have a sense of panic (heh, I mean, yeah I do, what with the meltdown and all) about it, and I follow the news with one eye closed. It’s too vividly colorful; it looks like a stage set with upturned boats and buildings in the bright sunlight.

I can’t imagine the eeriness of Japan at night now. It must be a nightmare.

Look. There, I’m doing it again. Now I have to go watch my son playing with Legos for a while….

Thanks, Meg.

I always look at my surroundings in light of the unfolding tragedy and it becomes too much to bear. And we do hold each other tighter, and hope it helps. But it’s so large this time.

Ugh. Anyway, thanks.

And so we keep breathing, moving forward, kissing our babies and counting our blessings.

Thanks for phrasing this experience with such clarity. I, so far, have failed to.

It’s weird. We feel as though we should experience it by being saturated by it, because to not share in the misery makes us bad people. But it just wrecks me, and then I’m useless to everyone, especially my family. It’s really a bizarre conflict, playing out internally in people all over the world.

I don’t know what to do about the reactors. I know I have to pay attention, because, wow. But it just freaks me out and I start to panic. What am I serving? Nothing. Which makes me feel…etc.

Thanks, Meg. Hope to see you soon, with a whole hand.

The interns were amazing that night. Funny, performing a silly play for the kids, just awesome. I can’t imagine how they’re dealing with it, many of them getting ready to fly home in a couple of weeks. What meets them across the ocean must be daunting, too, even if their families are no-where near the northeast. It must feel much like it did after WWII, just ravaged.

I don’t have any answers at all, which I think as humans is a difficult thing. We have come to expect our brains to be able to work things out. How can this be worked out? Time, I guess.

Thanks for writing what so many of us are feeling.

I would say more but I broke my hand and one handed typing doesn’t work very well.

My guess is that going to the party and listening to the interns talk about their homeland to their hosts in another country will be helpful to them.

For me, it was difficult to be up at 3 AM in Hilo listening to the radio, trying to get news from the internet, wondering whether the tsunami scheduled to hit us would be medium-sized or small. No one was suggesting it would be a major one. And earlier that night we had an earthquake (small).

I was watching the clips from Japan and reading about their troubles and I felt as though I had almost no right to be worrying about Hawaiian minor-league consequences from the major-league earthquake in Japan. Their tsunami killed thousands. Ours, even in the worst predicted case, might perhaps kill a careless or stupid onlooker or two. Our earthquake wasn’t even worth mentioning.

Intellectually I accepted this but emotionally I felt as though I needed to give Hilo my full worrying-force while at the same time feeling as though I shouldn’t.

In the end, not much happened here. Certainly nothing that could be called disastrous, although a small number of people in Kona lost their houses along a bay where the surge and the bay worked against them.

Anyway, I probably shouldn’t be saying this under my real name. Damn.

The Libya thing frustrates people, indeed, because they’re watching and it feels like we’re all on the battlefield with them, except that we’re safely at home. The sad thing is, if these protesters lose they’ll all be tortured or killed and we’ll all have forgotten by next week, washed away with the next media storm.

I had an application on my desktop for a while that showed seismic activity in the world all the time. In many ways it was reassuring because there are earthquakes everywhere, all the time. The Pacific Rim is one gigantic event that keeps unfolding to greater or lesser degree; most of the time we’re unaware of it. But every now and then, the earth makes one giant chiropractic adjustment and we realize how small we are.

The small deaths–a million individuals dying every week–versus the big death. Both can rock people to their foundations. I was rocked by my father last year, but it’s one tiny blip in the ocean. This has the capacity to rock individuals beyond reason, and it’s where our compassion and empathy shines, but also makes us vulnerable to extreme, if misplaced, grief. I can’t have it unfold in my living room anymore. It’s just too much.

I’ll hug Lenore for you, carefully, but pinching Duke?
Have you ever seen Duke in real life?
He’s young, muscle-bound and eight feet tall.
Even if he likes me, he might react instinctively and crush me like a cockroach.
I might tell him you send a pinch.
How’s that?

Yes, miasma is a perfect description. I’m keeping myself informed, but trying to not feed the temptation to get sucked into the the miasma. So far, so good. I’m donating money to Mercy Corps, keeping in touch with friends…and hoping I’ll know how to keep being sane.

It makes the point in a horribly overt way that no matter the magnitude of an event, life goes on. 9-11 was so strange because nationally the weather was perfect. Not a cloud in the sky, temperate, balmy. And the footage pouring in was this stark miserable contrast. It was really surreal.

Well, nothing you didn’t experience yourself. Ah, well. In some ways it’s encouraging that our kids just go through it with a laugh. It would be too heartbreaking to explain the enormity of events like this.

I had an earthquake right under my feet here in NH a couple days ago. Like, epicenter exactly under my animal barn. It was a very small one, but the animals were certainly freaking over it.

And yes, it seems that seismic activity is on the rise. Or, the other possibility is that the earth just keeps on keeping on, but because of the reach of the media, all global pain becomes local pain.

There’s a lot of people dying, all day, every single day…something close to a million people a week cash in their ticket, globally, with perhaps 1 percent of them being untimely… but today the difference is that they all die in your living room, instead of some unfathomable distance away.

It broke my heart, the tussle between wanting to bear solemn witness and wanting to be with her in her laughter. It reminded me of 9/11, when my son was an infant in an unusually good mood, and the weather was so beautiful, and we went to the lake with a friend to absorb the tragedy and felt confused by the mixture of horror and a baby’s joy.

I…well. Thanks.

So I bypassed it. I’ve learned a great deal of self-restraint when it comes to massive human tragedy; I know what my limits are and they’re very low. Which doesn’t mean I don’t empathize; it’s impossible not to. But I don’t bathe in the endless show until the next one comes along. That just seems cynical and unholy.

Also interesting about the internet. I wonder if you’ll find out the answer to that riddle, too!

It’s true about the immediacy of today. It took weeks for the British to discover that they were at war with the colonists in America in 1775. Now we “tweet”, a ridiculous term which apparently is with us for the duration, and we learn of people being shot in Libya while they’re being shot. It’s unbelievable. I often feel like we’re living in science fiction, which may just be a mark of old age. But I wonder how all this information, good, bad and indifferent, is over-saturating our brains.

I always love your comments, David. Thanks!

Not for me anyway; I don’t have family in this crisis so I don’t need to avail myself of the ever-ready media blitz to find lost loved-ones. I’m glad that people can search for each other more quickly now in that respect, but the ever-present images on every screen just kill me.

It’s funny about the surfers. I’ve heard that lots of surfers were pretty bummed. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry or both. And the media can suck it. Screw their trolling for the next crisis. I’m sick of their shit.

Thanks, Joe.

I have a friend who was in the earthquake in San Francisco in 1989, and she had terrible PTSD afterward. Be sure that you’re not just coping–make sure you’re taken care of completely. She was like the walking wounded for over a year; I imagine that you’ll be making your own way delicately and slowly as well. It’s just too damned hard to make solid ground which becomes liquid make sense.

I hope you’re good–we’re all rooting for you all over the world. And know that you always have places to stay where-ever you might travel. We want to hold you with our arms and eyes once again!

It’s enough to make one question their sanity.

Anyway, I don’t feel survivors guilt, but I do feel helpless, frozen. I wish I could do something more active than send money to Mercy Corps, but I don’t know what to do so I send money to Mercy Corps. That’s all I know. That and writing about how paralyzed I feel. How ironic is that?

Thanks, Lorna, as always.

Maybe it’s maturity–recognizing the signs that my mental fabric is beginning to tear–but I wonder how many people don’t know how to switch off and either become inured to the suffering, or fall prey to the same debilitating paralysis I felt in other crises.

Well. Enough of that. Yes, words are enough. More than enough. Thanks, Ronlyn, as always.

It makes me admire emergency workers, people in crisis zones, war zones, disaster areas. I have no idea how they do what they do without going insane, but they have my undying respect.

Thanks for the compliment, nevertheless. I just realized I couldn’t handle any more; it’s a relief that I’m not the only one with image fatigue.

As, of course, we do.

Sometimes to the point of paralysis. Because the facts and the situations are overwhelming – seeing the footage of that wall of water simply engulfing everything in its path… how do you feel like you could make a difference to something like that?

There was a huge earthquake in southern China on Thursday – a place I’m visiting in a couple of months. Tens of thousands of homes were destroyed or seriously damaged and dozens of people were killed. But no one really seems aware of it. It’s further away, I guess. I Googled it today and found that mostly the internet is concerned with the impact of the Japan earthquake on Chinese stocks…

The internet went down across China for a long time yesterday, too. According to some sources, the government was “switching the internet off and on” to clamp down on reports coming out of the earthquake zone.

For some reason I found myself awake at 2 a.m. and flipped on the tv to scan some sports scores while falling back asleep. Instead I saw the images of the tsunami and next thing I know, I’m awake, alert, and trolling FaceBook to see what friends might be impacted and how much concern, if any, I should have, living so close to the coast.

The tsunami arrived in my neighborhood in the form of a 2.2 foot set of waves. The only damage done was to the expectation of the surf community and the media, who were camped out along the coast, describing just how bad the effects could be if the waves were 20 feet or so.

While we’re OK, my heart goes out to the real victims. In the meantime, we can only hope that the media eventually finds the appropriate themes and perspectives to disseminate these events to the world.

Quenby,
I feel the same way. As well, I feel a sense of quilt. Guilt to wake up in a warm bed, guilt that I have running water, guilt about turning the key in the ignition of my car and driving on even roadways. I had to turn off the tv this morning because it’s tough enough to see it once, but with the way media covers it and continues to show the destruction over and over again every 15 minutes, it haunts me and I feel so helpless.

About the only thing I can do that feels somewhat comforting is to hit my knees and pray.

With all due respect to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina was my most direct teacher on how I personally need to manage such things. Although where I live got an edge of it, we lost power for days. I was spared the early videos and photos because we couldn’t use TVs or computers. Then, once the power did come on again, I intentionally avoided images. I knew I couldn’t handle it. (I have ancestral ties to New Orleans and several friends were displaced.)

Now, when disasters happen, I stay informed, but I do so with words, not pictures.

Thanks for this compassionate piece.

Turning off the BBC is probably a really good idea.

Love to you, Q

I am assured that my family is safe but await confirmation. I need to stop streaming BBC and compose myself.
Thank you again.
xoxo

And I wonder how many of us, not skilled in media criticism or hyper-aware of the saturation, are rendering ourselves completely impotent because we become like the deer in the headlights, stunned and frozen and too stupid to look away and keep walking.

Ugh. I feel ill.

I don’t know what to do. I can’t be an ostrich. But I also can’t deal with the impotence. I’m so sad about what’s been happening (from Haiti, to Chile, to Christchurch, to Japan…) But my sadness serves no one, least of all the people whose lives have been directly affected. I send money when I can. I hug my children more.

I don’t know.

Very timely discussion piece, Q. Thanks for getting it going.