Japan Disaster and my reaction

Smoke seen from another explosion from the power plant in northern Japan.

Another explosion and now radiation is leaking out and becoming a hazard...

The Chief Cabinet Secretary has made this ominous warning: Please do not go outside. Please stay indoors. Please close windows and make your homes airtight. Don't turn on ventilators. Please hang on your laundry indoors.

People have no food or water or power. Elderly sick have been left to die in hospitals. Thousands of bodies washed up on shore up and down the coastlines. Now, they face radiation poisoning.

This disaster has affected me a lot more than I would have expected. I think about it all day. Looking through images, I found this image showing before and after at Sendai. It's just so horrible.

Steve and I were talking about why this is affecting us so much more than other tragedies in the recent past, like the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean which claimed more than 230,000 lives. (click on the link for an article from National Geographic) Or the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. (click on the links for Before/After galleries)

We think part of it has to do with the fact that we don't play WoW anymore. We have more attention for things like reading the news and seeing what's going on in the world.

Also, almost every new camera out there can now shoot video, and cameras shoot much higher resolution images. The internet is better than ever at allowing people to communicate quickly, so there is a lot more information. More than any other non-local tragedy, this one really seems to be right in my face. It's impossible to ignore.

One last thing: tsk, tsk to people like Gilbert Gottfried and 50 Cent who were so totally out of line to make jokes about Japan's disaster. I'm very happy to know that Gottfried lost a job over his insensitive Tweets. Once he realized he might have made a very poor judgement call, he pulled the commentsm but not before Buzzfeed got them first. 50 Cent later apologized for his insensitive remarks but why would ANYONE say something so awful in the first place? It really boggles the mind.

Can you even understand this? Those are all cargo containers, which stand about 7 feet tall by about 20 feet long. Do the math. I can barely wrap my mind around this reality.