The tsunami in South Asia caused unimaginable death and devastation. The sheer enormity of the event is difficult to assimilate, intellectually and emotionally. We asked five thinkers how they comprehended the disaster.
'The natural world we had taken for granted'
Robert Coles
The tsunami tragedy in South Asia saddened me for the tens of thousands who died, for the tens of thousands who suffer as survivors. It also took me back to 1938, when a hurricane lashed Greater Boston. I was a fifth-grader then, and I still vividly recall leaving the Roger Wolcott School for the walk home, which was not far -- when all of a sudden I saw my mother standing across the street. Her face registered concern, and her words told me why: "A hurricane is coming, and let's get back to the house right away."
Those words have stayed with me, as has the memory of her, my brother, Bill, and me in our house, without electricity and the wind outside howling incessantly; soon enough, trees came down hard, including one on our roof. Even now, I can hear us all worriedly listening, watching, waiting -- and yes, wondering: What will happen if the hurricane continues?
We could only speculate about what lay ahead -- even as we and our friends in the neighborhood took note, days after the hurricane, of the severe damage to property and to the natural world we had taken for granted. Not least, we asked questions: What causes such hurricanes, and what might be done in the future to safeguard against such an event?
For my father, an engineer and a scientist, there were explanations of cause and effect to consider (and offer us kids). For my mother, steeped in the Bible and in the novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Melville and the stories of Chekhov, there was life's inevitable drama to ponder, the shifts and turns of fate, chance, circumstance.
Thinking about the tsunami, I can hear my parents talking about the hurricane, can remember hearing it come at us suddenly endangered folks, rendered alarmed, afraid and newly vulnerable.
-- Coles is James Agee professor of social ethics at Harvard University and the author of the "Children of Crisis" series.
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'Many countries, many tongues, many altars, drowned'
Richard Rodriguez
During the afternoon, on the day after Christmas, I heard about an earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean, and the tsunami.
