When nature strikes

When nature takes on the role of a villain there’s nothing man can do about it. This has happened in the past in Sumatra, in Lattur, in California, in Haiti and is happening almost every year in Bangladesh. Lives are lost, structures are swept away, power sources are cut, and fields are turned into marshes overnight.

It’s a giant and awe inspiring spectacle when that happens. Mighty forces are unleashed and they pull everything down on their way to some destination the nature has set. We can only turn mute and look at what’s happening. Every time man finds a remedy for an impending disaster the nature invents a new one or ups the scale on which its forces are let loose. There’s no let up.

And there are no real remedies, the only option is flight. The history of man’s progress is the history of flight both from nature without and nature within. We fly from nature by fortifying our defenses against it.

When the nature wants blood it gets it every time. Men knew of this from the time they knew how to reason. They invented gods by reasoning thus but they were just children of our imaginations and knew not how to help us. The failed gods led us to the only truth that we could find- that of the unity of man and nature, that of the single truth of existence.

But philosophy wouldn’t forestall disasters. Even precautions do little to avert calamities. A part of Japan is under floods now, from the pictures that we see the floods have destroyed most of what man has painstakingly built over a lot of years. The waters seem to advance slow but sure on a path of complete destruction.

The Japanese are a resilient people; they have survived unimaginable natural and manmade disasters in the past and I am sure that they would do it again. They are the people who built an economic empire out of a land lacking in resources. It’s a tiny land with giant aspirations; it’s a tiny people with mighty resolve.
I wish well for them and I extend my sympathies with the people on my land to that devastated land and it’s currently suffering people... Let nothing get you down; let the calamity strengthen your resolve to be winners again.