7 9-11's

Like everyone else in the world, I've been following the news of this unfathomable disaster in South Asia. A 9.0 earthquake? Unthinkable, even here in Southern California, where all the buildings are retrofitted and prepared for a massive shaker. In Colombo, Sri Lanka, there isn't any money to keep buildings safe or prepare evacuation plans. When an egregriously oversized earthquake hits, that's it...your home collapses.

It's that death toll number that keeps coming back into my mind. 22,000 dead. Over 7 9/11 disasters. Most of all, it makes me feel very small. How many people dying in that disaster were young men just like me, filled with hope about their lives, possibly even thinking that this would make a great update for their blog moments before a gi-normous tidal wave hits their village and wipes out everything they've ever known about, forever. It's tragedy on a mind-numbing scale.

So, that's about all I have to say about it. I promise to go back to discussing which movies are the most 1337 now, or some crap.

Oh, just one more thought on this subject...How come, whenever there's some international tragedy in some far off place like Colombo, Sri Lanka, the American media has to give us a story about how many Americans died there? For example, right next to the Yahoo headline that reads "Tidal Waves Kill 22,000 in Nine Countries," there's a headline that reads "Eight Americans Confirmed Dead in Tsunami." Who gives a shit? It's 8 Americans. That many people die each day choking on breakfast burritos, jumping out of moving golf carts, listening to Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" too loud. It's an insignificant story. Are our egos so massive that we can't take an interest in 22,000 people dying unless 8 of them were good white folks from Mobile, Alabama?