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Dec. 28, 2004 We are witnesses to a great tragedy over the past week. On December 26th, an undersea earthquake registering 8.9 on the Richter scale struck offshore near Indonesia. This massive quake--the strongest recorded since 1960--produced a massive tidal wave, what the Japanese term a tsunami. Traveling in the open ocean at over 500 miles per hour, it quickly traversed open ocean and struck coastal areas of nine different nations, taking most residents completely by surprise. So far, as of this writing, the death toll has exceeded 22,500 and is rising almost hourly. No firm estimate has been ventured with respect to the cost in dollars this event has caused, but, human toll aside, the costs will no doubt be in the multiple billions of dollars. Brace yourselves. The so-called "environmental movement" in this country and elsewhere are preparing announcements that it was HUMAN activity that caused this tragedy--mostly AMERICAN human activity. As silly as that sounds, there have already been talk show guests who've opined that humans (especially Americans) have so stressed the Earth's crust by laying concrete for super highways, erecting massive structures, digging holes for oil wells and even septic tanks, that "Mother Nature" has rebelled with hurricanes, typhoons, tornados and, yes, earthquakes. Why this knee-jerk reaction to any natural disaster? Who knows, except to say that these screwballs MUST find a way to blame American affluence for all the world's woes--further evidence that, in this country at least, the "environmentalists" are really the unreconstructed communists of past decades who've recognized that their agenda cannot be advanced politically here, so they must advance it by other means. Those "other means" turn out to be the destruction of American economic might by whatever means possible. One of those "means" is to try and make Americans feel guilty about their affluence. You will no doubt notice over the next few weeks that the preponderance of the aid going to those countries devastated by the tsunami will come from the U.S. This, despite a recent charge that we are "selfish" because, as a proportion of our GNP, we donate to international relief causes "less than our fair share." That's the wrong way to figure, though. As a proportion of our population, we donate almost infinitely more relief aid than the country which is in second place in total donations. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to even KNOW which country comes in second, the amounts donated are so vastly overshadowed by American largesse. All this will be for naught in the final analysis, though. Americans won't be given "credit" for our generosity (as if "credit" were our motivation in the first place.) Instead, we'll again be vilified by most other countries for "not doing more." In 1958, William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick co-authored a best- selling book that was eventually made into a movie entitled, "The Ugly American." In that book, at one point, the "arrogance of Americans" was pointed out by the fact that bags of rice in the form of food aid from America were being imprinted with the notice, "Gift of the People of the Soviet Union," in the language of Sarkan, the mythical SE Asian country in which much of the story occurs. This was supposedly done by a Soviet agent dock-worker and it goes unnoticed by Americans at the embassy because, presumably, Americans were too arrogant to learn the local language. While that book had much to recommend it, it was more an indictment of the American diplomatic corps than of Americans in general. No nation on the planet is, in general, more generous and open- handed than America is--both publically and privately. Oklahoman Larry Jones' "Feed the Children" organization, for example, has gathered and shipped hundreds of tons of clothing, water and food to natural disaster-torn places like Central Turkey and even China when every other country in the world stood around wringing its figurative hands about how "tragic" the loss of life was. FTC will undoubtedly be the quickest to respond to the current tragedy in SE Asia, as well. In fact, dozens of truckloads of goods are already enroute from this group. My point is simply that the idiots who seek to find some way to blame any natural disaster on Americans' "excessive paving" or CO2 emissions are baying at the moon and are deliberately ignoring the fact that such disasters have always been with humanity--Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD, for example, or Krakatoa in the late 19th Century--a volcanic eruption that was HEARD over 2000 miles distant. Just as there isn't anything we can do to PREVENT such occurrances, there's nothing we can do to CAUSE them, either. All we can do is to respond to them as Americans are currently doing--with our prayers, our generosity and our labors. ------------ About the author: David A. Jared is a news junkie, semi-retired and an avid golfer who's been writing his first book, "4000 years of chopsticks" for the last 20 years. Email: Pappadave@sbcglobal.net ------------- All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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