Let us pray…

It's been raining continuously for the past few nights. The rain only just stopped yesterday, leaving the streets glistening wet and smooth. Clean. Unlike the carnage seen in the streets just across the Straits. Clichéd though it is, sometime during the night I wondered if the gods were crying for us, in our place, because the grief of the survivors was so great that some had no tears to express it. It still drizzles once in a while, and I am reminded of the Great Flood, and, although I am not a Christian, the story of Noah and the Ark.

Then again, it is quite hard not to think about such things, when this catastrophe is of almost-biblical proportions, and the death toll increases by the day like the list of casualties in a war. Whenever I read the newspapers, I almost always wonder if this has truly happened; it all seems rather surreal to me. Here, we are still going about our everyday lives, sitting at computers, relaxing in armchairs, trying to finish holiday homework we should have completed two weeks ago, fretting over deadlines…while a couple hundred miles across the sea, people have died. Fellow humans are sitting amongst corpses and dead relatives, trying to cook instant noodles and staying alive.

Don’t you find it all very surreal? I do.

I find it impossibly hard to grasp the entire situation, to wrap my mind around it. To me, it is rather like a war, actually. One in which Nature had finally triumphed. It is also a reminder as to why we should never challenge Nature too much or drive Her too far. After all, Nature can never be tamed by Man; in fact, I will rue the day that we are able to control the weather. We need that little bit of unpredictability in our lives, we really do. It serves as a wake-up call to us all. And we need one once every fifty years or so, it knocks some sense into us, because you can not argue with Nature.

Speaking of the gods and Nature; today, my form teacher told my class something worth thinking about. She told us that her young son had asked her why God (they are Christians) had punished the people in ‘Ground Zero’, asked if they had been ‘naughty’, (the result of her having told him that God punished people who are naughty.). She confessed that at the time, she did not know how to answer him.

There are many ways of answering this question, but the way I see it, the gods do not protect. They cannot always protect, for if they did, we would never learn anything and probably would not have even invented things like lightning conductors because we would not have experienced any of it before. To me, the gods are witnesses. They throw us a situation and watch us and wait for us to learn something from the disasters they present us with.

If you are about to kill me now, because I am being completely inhumane and heartless; wait, hear me out.

Here is an example. When you were a child, did your parents ever forbid you to step out of your bed for fear that you would hurt yourself on, say, the door handle? Did they ask that you not play with toys because you might poke yourself and get a little bruise? Did they stop you from taking your first steps? Learning to ride a bicycle?

Most probably not.

The same applies to the gods above. They cannot keep us sheltered forever. Then we would be even more vulnerable. Instead, they give us situations and force us to learn from them so that we might be kept safer and have higher chances of survival the next time it happens.

Or, perhaps, they are tired of watching the wars, war atrocities and needless deaths occurring throughout the world, and decided to throw us a disaster of such a great magnitude so that we would be forced to return to the very basic roots of humanity. To return to the very first basic values that we should have, that we learnt. Now, no matter what race or religion, the tsunami survivors must help each other, and, when faced with such a great tragedy, they must help each other. As for the rest of the world, it is a natural (or political) reaction for them to send aid and help in anyway they can.

Through these disasters, we learn to appreciate the simple things in life once more. We learn, perhaps, not to yearn for the iPod so much when we can spend time with our family and friends. Or perhaps to call that secondary school friend for yet another chat. We learn to care about nameless crowds we have not even met yet but somehow seem to know. Disasters like these tear down the fortified fortresses and ice shields that we have placed over our hearts. We learn to share, to truly give.

What a pity it had to take a catastrophe of near-biblical proportions for us to remember all that we have forgotten as media and technology consume us and leave others behind.

The gods are probably still watching. Let’s not disappoint them again, our silent witnesses.

Amen, indeed. Amen.

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