1st time I put an article on this blog, but I really wanna share this one with u guys ... made by Rex murphy :
The worst things happen in the poorest places to people in the weakest circumstances.
Dec. 28, 2004
Hearing and watching the news over the last few days has left most people numb. However many tens of thousands will have been killed following the earthquake-tsunami, there will be tens of hundreds of thousands more in mourning, houseless, stricken with disease and wracked with pain.
It is a monumental misery being endured by those peoples in the ring of countries where the devastation was most concentrated.
It should remind us here on the heels of Christmas in ways that are far too numerous to count that we, in what we call the West, are always on the top side of fortune's wheel. That whatever are the miseries or contentions of life, say, here in Canada, most of our misfortunes and conflicts are by comparison contracted and trivial. We're lucky, if that's the right word, to live in a part of the world where it's news if an airport is shut down because of a storm or there's a rash of fender benders after the first snowfall.
It is an axiom of this world that the worst things happen in the poorest places to people in the weakest circumstances. If you were born in the West, you've won the only lottery that really counts from the very first moment you take air. It's very early in the response to the calamity now unfolding, but not too early to ask what our country plans to do.
A natural disaster is a miserable combination of words, but a natural disaster does come with one single benefit... it is free of all the fogs of politics. There are just thousands and thousands of truly innocent people living a nightmare of pain, want, and dislocation. We Canadians like to cherish the notion that we are a right-feeling nation. Our present government has given signals that it sees itself and the country it governs as being an agency, a source of international conscience. This week's news is going to test that reputation. Are we going to be one of the countries which waits for others to propose response and action? Are we ready to deploy troops and money, both in substantial amounts, to do the charity — and that's the right word — that this monumental disaster calls for? Do we have them?
