It is not easy to take all this in, to comprehend it, to fathom it. Japan has suffered a triple blow. Disastrous, catastrophic earthquakes certainly have happened many times before in many places, even recently. Chile, Haiti, New Zealand, just to name a few. And also recently there was the tsunami that destroyed much and killed many along the coastline of Indonesia and around the adjacent Indian Ocean. But now Japan has suffered not only the earthquake, but also the concurrent tsunami, and to cap it off the Fukushima Daiichi cataclysm.
As did many, I watched some of the videos captured by the people in Japan who were not crushed or swept away. The power of nature is astounding and impressive and the vulnerability of people to natural forces is astounding and terrifying. More terrifying is the vulnerability of people to their own errors.
And now the numbers in Japan are truly awful. More than 18000 people believed to have been killed in this disaster. Meanwhile, radiation is showing up many miles from the reactors. And we hear that in hard hit areas where food is scarce, with a plethora of vending machines all around, not one has been broken into.
Japan will recover. It will take time, it will be costly, but Japan knows how to recover. They have been through this before.
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