The first thing I do each morning is check world news.....ever since 9-11, I fear waking up to some terrorist attack or some other god-awful occurrence on our planet. This morning's Yahoo news showed 111 pictures to arrow through.....pictures of the victims of the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster. Can it get worse than that?
One little girl was using her dog's stomach for a pillow, while sleeping on a gymnasium floor shelter. The victims are working hard to maintain some semblance of normalcy, by doing physical exercises, doing laundry and hanging it over gymnasium seats and rails to dry, children are playing card games on the floor.....all the while outside the gymnasium walls there is nuclear radiation seeping its way into everything.
After arrowing through all 111 pictures, I feel the urge to stick my fist into any mouth here in the U.S. that has the audacity to complain about anything. Religions can tell us about a waiting hell when we die, but I'm thoroughly convinced that death isn't necessary for us to get a glimpse of hell.
I heard myself say out loud this morning, "How could a good god let this happen?" Yet, there are pictures of Japanese victims with their hands folded and heads bent in solemn prayer. They still believe. They still feel that there is a Greater Force that will help them. No matter how bad things get, no matter how lost and alone we are, no matter how deep into despair we fall, there is that innate strength inside us that points toward a magnetic North. That North being our Source of Life.
We here in the United States want to help these people, yet we can't be guaranteed that our money will ever reach them. How sad. I personally wish there would be a way for me to help one person, or one animal, one-on-one. Even prayer seems so insignificant in comparison to the size of this mess.
Will the Japanese victims ever really know how sad and full of sorrow we are? What can we do? Maybe the best thing is for us to donate good deeds to those living next to us. Maybe, just maybe, that will cause a tsunami of its own kind and keep flooding goodness around the world. If each of us would do one really nice thing for someone else today, and that person would pass it on to another, and that keep going and going, then our one good deed could make a huge difference and eventually reach those people lying homeless on gymnasium floors.
Rarely a day goes by that I'm not thankful that I'm the age that I am. The world that I knew when I was a little girl is gone. So are the morals and the work ethic that was literally drilled into us from little on. We all pitched in to make our family life work. Chores were assigned according to our age, and our responsibility slowly grew to where we could manage an adult load. That felt good. We did as we were told, we earned a less than reasonable wage when we entered the workforce, but we were told if we start at the bottom we'd have somewhere to go. It maybe wasn't easy, but it darned well taught us that we are here to give to the world, not take until all its resources are used up.
