Tsunami

Comforting her in disaster and grief.  Courtesy of CBS new york.

 

Earthquake 9.0 on the Richter scale.  Shaking of the ground walked on.  Nowhere to turn.  Deep crevices.

Fear, tight quivering and shaking.  Wondering.  Then fear in aftershocks.

Soon giant waves engulf.  Washing away earth, memory, time.  Brown and black and blue Engulfs.

Houses, offices, hospitals, the places of care and everyday, the places of the heart, moving and washing away.

Loved ones drowned in tears and mud and collapsed buildings and now searched for, to be lost or found.

Relief when faces and voices again reclaim love.

I still search for my cousin somewhere, lost in Sendai.  Not a word.   Fear, longing, regrets, hope, grief, waiting and waiting. Searching.

I see seven, ten, twenty, one hundred blogs that say that it is retribution for Pearl Harbor.   Then Hiroshima is not enough.

Those people claim to know God and to understand their own hatreds and conceptions of their privilege, not to mention a lack of historical knowledge and love.  How can it be?  The whole world,then, is a universe of retributions continuing.  Why not embrace and take care, to even acknowledge the tsunami.

Nuclear fears are not new for the elderly who lived through the war.  The Pacific War that brought the wrath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the sixty-six cities that burned from the firestorms of American chemical weapons.  Then nuclear fears were supposed to be abaited as the US and Japan made nuclear pacts.  But then, we find out that there were secret nuclear deals between the two nations and Okinawa was used to house and transport nuclear weapons and parts for them, unknown to the world, of course–as governments and covert things are going on under our noses.  The Japanese see the rubble of the tsunami and the problems of the radiation waters and explosions and foods now as continuous World War created by their own governments’ relationship to nation, war, power, and the United States.  But to no avail.  This understanding is trivial compared to the power of the needs and the desires and the ignorances that are required to continue the idea of  nuclear power being a ‘necessity.’  Wealth, travel, machinery, going here and there, are all now, questioned somehow amidst the rubble of the washed away and destroyed landscape of much of northern Japan.

Earthquake, tsunami, nuclear power plants, our world.  Should we not question our own actions and to reach out for life and love, peace and other ways of living that do not just benefit a certain few in our world?  Shall the voices of the elders who have warned us of these dangers, be silenced once more?  The Japanese look out over the landscape now and see its eerie similarities to the period at the end of the Pacific War.  The destruction and death are again, destruction and death.  The Prime Minister has said that this is the worst disaster in Japanese history since the Pacific War times.   No wonder people have been reciting Pearl Harbor’s war call and religious mumblings about its place in history. But it’s also the more important fact that people are reaching out and concerned, loving and understanding in a world that is connected.  We are connected.

We are connected.  Reach.  In reaching, we must understand that our earth is changing.  Climate change is not just a phrase and fantasy. Each of us must understand that life is now changing quickly.  What will we put our energies into now?  Do we succumb to our ideas that humanity is ugly or sinful at its heart?  We must combat self-hatreds and hatred of others and to come to grips with how much we need each other and our ecologies.  Every bit.  Let us reconsider our links.  Let us see this tsunami for something other than something that happened far away.  It is our tsunami.