The world has been ravaged by natural disasters over the past few days. It is truly frightening, for example, to be on a JetBlue airplane, watching CNN on your way to your parent’s house, only to see multiple reports on cyclones and earthquakes. New York City looked like it was living through it’s own little hurricane yesterday; as the trees were whipping their leaves and continuous rain poured into the afternoon. But a lot of people have died by mother nature’s hand over the weekend.
Firstly, a straight up historic 7.9 magnitude earthquake shook China, and an estimated 12,000 people have died, with an unknown amount of deaths predicted. There are reports of students being trapped under their schools and of the quake, which happened in Chengdu, being felt as far away as Pakistan and Vietnam. I mean what does a 10 magnitude earthquake do, turn the Earth inside out? Is the scale out of 10?
In the US, people have died in the South, where there has been a tornado outbreak. There have been 72 confirmed tornadoes, and 108 reported since May 7. A lot of buildings, trees and property have been damages and 24 people have been killed. Though this damage is not trivial, the reports coming from Myanmar are devastating.
In Myanmar, the death toll has reached 22,500. The government, which is blocking UN and US attmepts to aid the damaged country, has released these numbers- along with the missing totalling 41,000. The goverment is placing restrictions on the aid it receives, requesting money to distribute to its people. Which no one will obviously do. There is a rice shortage, and deaths are expected to increase from starvation and bad conditions.
I mean, it’s windy here, and there’s nothing you can really do to prevent a cyclone.
2 responses so far ↓
1 gregory // May 17, 2008 at 3:53 am
found your site from a comment on techcrunch, not being able to understand blog valuations, me either … you have a nice site, but i was stopped by this quote…
“It is truly frightening, for example, to be on a JetBlue airplane, watching CNN on your way to your parent’s house, only to see multiple reports on cyclones and earthquakes. ”
…. and it got me to spend this time to comment, to wonder, where such ideas of fear come from, maybe the cnn word is a giveaway, the mediated existence, instead of real life, forming your sense of self and reality, that such a smart guy could be so fooled, so much as to forget his own being…
2 Bryan Woods // May 17, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Hey Gregory -
It’s confusing, there are actually two authors of this blog. I posted that comment on Tech Crunch, but this article is written by Monika Ostrowski.
I can’t speak for Monika on her feelings on those words, but I will go out on a branch and say that the fear I was feeling when the plane was coming back in to land at JFK and teetering with the wind had absolutely nothing to do with mass media or our culture.
There’s something very unnatural to me about flying. Something about giving up every piece of yourself to a machine and one man. Combine those fears with the fears of mother nature, and you’ve got considerable synergism.
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