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Tsunami heroes

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Surfacing from the deluge of news reports about the devastation of coastal Thailand fishing towns, political sniping at the amount of aid pledged by the United States, and frustrated Western seismologists staring at flashing instruments without the phone numbers of anybody in Sumatra, one realizes that only certain details of the tragedy seem to linger — all of them being small, individual acts of heroism.
…excerpt from: www.salon.com…

India Uncut

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Read. This. Page. It will upset you, disgust you, hopefully piss you off, but it will also tell at least part of the real story of what’s going on five days after the tsunami.

Excerpt from:
India Uncut
It’s five kilometres of hell, and it’s right here at Nagapattinum.

Kaviarsi studies — make that studied — in the sixth standard. Her schoolbooks lie a short distance away, and besides them lies a doll. The girl herself lies on a makeshift pyre on what used to be her home, her face totally blackened, her neck twisted upwards, the skin peeling off her legs like torn stockings. There is a large empty container of Pepsi lying just besides her, and four other bodies. And besides the pyre, towards the sunset, are five long kilometers of slushy wasteland strewn with dead bodies.

It wasn’t like this five days ago. We — me and two companions — are at a part of Nagapattinum called Akkarakadai, where a prosperous fishing community lived. This five-kilometre-long stretch of land was filled with houses, and had at its heart a bustling Sunday marketplace. The people here were well off — some of them had expensive fishing launches costing many lakhs of rupees. Then the tsunami came.

These settlements begin half a kilometre from the sea, across the road, but the tsunami swept everything away. Every single house was flooded away, all the way till the end of the stretch, and when I went there, I just saw one long expanse of slush. In the distance, there were pyres burning.

Dr Narasimhan, a man I’d wanted to meet, who heads a team of relief workers that has come down from Salem, told me when I called him that we had to walk into that expanse, beyond the pyres. “Walk towards the sunset till you find me,” he said, and we did.

It took us half-an-hour to traverse the half-kilometre or so until we reached him. The ground was like quicksand in parts, and our shoes would sink in with each step and resist our attempts to lift our feet again. We came across dead bodies on the way: a young girl in a basket, her limbs akimbo, and her face, with some dried blood on it, contorted in an expression that even Damien Hirst would have found too macabre. Three feet away from her lay a woman, with a frozen look of horror on her face, etched into an eerie permanence.

“In an unprecedented situation, you need an unprecedented response”

“For the next five kilometres,” Dr Narsimhan motion towards the setting sun, “you will find bodies everywhere. Only the distance you have walked so far — around half a kilometre — has been cleared of corpses. This is the furthest point till which bodies have been cleared. There is so much work to be done.”

“It’s five days since the tsunami happened,” I say. “Why is this place so deserted, why hasn’t all this been sorted?”

Dr Narasimhan sighs. “Sorted,” he asks. “All that the government has been doing is lining the streets outside with bleaching powder. They are not interested in coming here, they left this to the NGOs. And look at this.” He extends his hands towards me. “We’re doing all the work of moving bodies with surgical gloves made of latex, which are no protection against cuts and bruises.”

TSUNAMI

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My girlfriend, who doesn’t read this blog nearly as often as she should, is Canadian so I post this here mostly for her benefit. :)

The Canadian government, until January 11th, will match any donation to major relief operations working from Canada.

In other words, you double the size of your donation if you send money this way, rather than by sending it directly to an affected country or donating in your own country.

Donations to Oxfam Canada, the Canadian Red Cross, World Vision Canada, UNICEF Canada, Care Canada, Doctors Without Borders, World University Service of Canada , Salvation Army, Canadian Food for the Hungry International, Save the Children Canada, and SOS Children’s Villages will all be doubled by the Canadian government — but only until January 11th.

Best wishes to everyone for the new year.
…excerpt from: www.williamgibsonbooks.com…

New Year’s Resolutions/anti-TV rant

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This is an excerpt. If you have kids, especially younger than 2 yrs, pay attention to the link in the last paragraph here. Then go to the site and read the rest of the post.

When I want to creep myself out, I walk around the neighborhood at 9 PM and count the number of houses in which I can see that blue glow. Television in the U.S. (and many other countries, but especially bad here) is so pervasive that it’s like that story of the boiling frog, where if you put the frog in water and then slowly turn up the heat, he won’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late. But if you dropped him in boiling water, he’d instantly know it was BAD and jump out.

Imagine an alien from a planet with intelligent, thoughtful life. He has no idea what television is (ignoring the fact that our signals are “out there”) when he drops into the average U.S. neighborhood (city, rural, doesn’t matter) and discovers that at night (and often day), the vast majority of people are sitting in front of a flickering screen with that kind of glazed look watching…what? (No matter how many people claim they’re watching “educational” programs, the Neilson ratings don’t support that. My special favorite are the stats that show the hypocrisy of things like “red states” where folks left the voting booth claiming a vote for moral values, then proceeded to go home and make “Desperate Housewives” a hit). It all sounds very sci-fi to me, because I’m thinking it would look EXACTLY like the whole country is sitting down for a nightly brainwashing.

I’m definitely not trying to insult anyone here; I owned a television until about five years ago, and it was on a lot. And not everyone who watches TV has a problem with it (although virtually nobody, according to the brain research, is entirely immune). And I’m not putting mindfully-watched movies (including TV shows on DVD) in this category. I LOVE my Netflix subscription, and watch some television programs on my iMac (Curb your Enthusiasm, BBC’s “The Office” are two favorites). TiVo also seems to be a great solution for a lot of folks.

But two things happened that made me get rid of normal television (although I do have a monitor for DVD’s and to use my Playstation 2):

* I noticed that when I was in an environment with no television, my stress level went way down. Whenever I stayed at a mountain cabin or even a B-and-B that just didn’t put a TV in your room, I noticed how much better I felt mentally and physically.

* I kept learning more and more about the brain, and couldn’t avoid learning about the effects of television. One of my favorite brain scientists, Richard Restak, has become famous as “the brain guy” for television, writing the companion books for various PBS specials, etc. He is like the Carl Sagan of the brain, and I love his books. But even the guy who makes a lot of money from television has suddenly began to speak out about its dangers, especially in this post-9-11 book: The New Brain: How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mind. (where he mentions studies including one suggesting that 9-11 survivors who watched a lot of television had a higher incidence of PTSD than those who watched less television).

(He also talks a little about TV in his newest book on how the brain is involved in fear and anxiety, “Poe’s Heart and the Mountain Climber.”)

TV isn’t good for your brain in a wide range of ways. Just one of the problems is that it can lead to a reduction in left-brain logical thinking unless you’re extremely careful (and capable) about making sure the news broadcasts are screened out. Because commercial news broadcasts are driven largely by the “if it bleeds it leads” approach, and those messages trigger the flight-or-fight response because your brain often can’t distinguish between experienced vs. visualized terror. MRI scans show that the same parts of your brain light up when you watch high resolution images as when you’re seeing it for real.

The issue of whether watching violence on TV is a problem is still hotly debated, but some–like the American Academy of Pediatrics–aren’t taking any chances, and have issued a recommendation that children under the age of two should not be exposed to television at all.