quakin' blues

Is there enough money in the world to relieve all the disasters when they occur simultaneously? Will there be enough money to pay firefighters when lightening strikes again? Do governments set a little liquidity aside in a secret column, (it should be secret now or someone will figure out a way to use it for something else like an infinity pool overlooking the Aegean) just in case all hell breaks loose? Or do they take out loans. Do they like to rebuild their mammoth beachfront resort hotels over and over? Wouldn't that be good for BAU to have a constant need with a constant flow of sequestered funds, new hires, new contractors, new designers, new tourists, new airports and hospitals and new high-tech security enhancements for all? Sure. And what if these disasters could be pumped into twofers or threefers, oh, that will happen, not if, but when and where and not too long from now at the rate its progressing. I sensed a little disappointment among the desperate shrieking pundits today, so primed for Hilo to be disastered on location on live TV, see it first, here and now as they quickly turned to Japan's coast with smatterings of the scene in Chile, a disaster on the scale of the fifth highest in magnitude in the history of all recorded earthquakes. The Chileans interviewed have a calm to them, realistic and resigned, fully disconnected intellectually to Haiti. Obviously this is because they are not descendants of African slaves, made malleable by debt poverty and dependent on the international shylocks, homeless, hopeless and shackled into sweatshop submission, ridiculed and starving: a true to life profound disaster unfolding at any time. No, Chileans appear confident their damages will be repaired without having to look elsewhere to the bondage of helping hands. The loss of life is a tragedy, but for the most part the damage to the infrastructure is an inconvenience, a workaround, to be managed by themselves. They are at this time reluctant to request intervention, shock of all shocks, because as they say, they have not been able to assess what aid they might require, if any. Of course, the road to the the other half of their country, the wild, untamed half, lies in ruins, they don't have a real body count yet. That body count might be impossible to assess. Lots of people out there don't want to be found: tribal people and such.

Don't take my word for these things, my information has come largely from TV. The frothing pundits get in the way of real facts, cutting off leading seismologists in the middle of explaining enlightening tecto/tsunamo-fact to interview a tourist evacuating a Hilo resort or taking a break for the sponsors. Hawaii is a US state you know and thus what happens in the US stays focused on the US by supreme decree.

Japan has not seen a tsunami warning coming their way for over fifteen years. In one and a half decades you can imagine how many people forgot the lesson and built right up to the sea's permissible edge, but they say they are well prepared unlike California who harbors replicating fast buck developers, building into the foothills and difficult to reach canyons so the inevitable wildfires consume any vegetation holding the earth in place (like trees) which then turns into mudslides with the heavy rains of winter. They prepare themselves with huge nets holding dirt in place. If you've never seen the sheer size of these nets, and ponder whatever they could possibly do to prevent a mudslide, you would not believe it. However, helpful of not, they can't net the whole state or the whole planet if it ever came to that. Nor can the tectonic plates sit still forever. The Earth does what it does and we are mere Gumby lookyloos picking up a geography lesson along the way. Common sense tells us Japan is a lot farther away from Chile than Hilo and not to expect much except these colorful computerized graphics of water rippling out from where the stone was dropped.

The worst that Hilo and Japan will see are the terrors of so many people evacuating at once. Reblowing the sirens WW2-style, incessantly doesn't help. The hospitals closed to evacuate their staff meaning going to the ER for treatment of the thousands of panic attacks taking place is not an option. There will be a lot of car accidents and likely a few vehicles careening into panicked crowds hauling their most precious heirlooms seeking escape. It could get very messy.

I've written often recently about the disasters one is required to experience in this adventure we call life. They have always been with us, personally and externally in the larger world. I've also mentioned the Forces that divine our journey - if you pay attention to them. It is clear the Earth has its own plan for survival and the Forces tell us we are irrelevant to this plan. We can invent technologies and predictors and evacuation plans until we are blue in the face but until we stop abusing the Earth's resources we remain irrelevant, a bothersome, tiresome, annoying destructive species stealing what never belonged to us and never will. We must be the joke of the Universe. Lovely, perfect Earth rotating on its axis with all the other magnificent heavenly bodies except she has this fatal flaw, those quarreling, relentless thieving humans squandering her bounty, intent on blowing up the whole sphere with materials cobbled together from her stunning body. In this way, the perps are organ harvesters.

But it appears she won't have to live as a joke for long. The humans will kill each other off and then she will calm down. There are more worthy species that help instead of harm the system. When the Homo Sapien species began to see itself as too big to fail, too clever and too invincible to be intimidated by the natural forces, we were marked for extinction and its happening now, in real time, in living color. Its even happening to you, as they bring the rest of us down with them.

When all has vanished that one needs to survive including materials to make a lean-to on the riverbank and edible forages are lost to the complete trashing of our food chain, we are cooked. Forget losing everything else, your possessions, your money, your transportation, your golden years, films, TV and the web, whatever place you call your home and all of its contents, its all drowning in the infinity pools as the violent seas ride roughshod over the globe.

We have seen the future, nothing is left to the imagination, and now it is here.

All images clickable, taken onsite 02.20.10, ccc. 2010