When they finally decided to call a halt to the body count, the total was over 155,000.
Standing outside the reality of the event, it is hard for one to realize the magnitude of what happened to those people. Even our emissary, a retired general in the armed forces, was nearly speechless when face to face with it.
Again, it comes down to our complacency- our arrogance. We think we are so important in the
scheme of things, that our world is the centre of all movement, all thoughts by the Gods. We are in fact no more than fellow specks of dust thrown together by chance for extremely short periods of time. Our whole known history doesn't make up a single blink on the galactic scale of time, yet we think it more important than all that came before or is yet to be.
The planet merely burped, people. Okay, by its standards, bletched. It was still nothing compared to what has gone on in the past, and may so again in the future.
One note of interest to me was that they have not found nearly as many dead animals and birds as one might have expected. Seems humans were the only ones oblivious until it was too late.
Our "progress" as a species has cost us something- a connectedness to the planet that could tell us things like this are happening. It is a shame too- we might be able to not destroy in our wake if we could feel the breath of Gaia.
There are not words enough, or perhaps words simply are pointless, to describe what has happened to these coastal areas. They will never be the same and much of the human history of the area may have been lost for good. All the media hype will probably hang on for awhile, but like other things of this type, eventually the horror will fade into the white noise of day-to-day living and become only so many pages in some history book. We attempt to remember with things like grave markers, but there comes a point where there is simply no one left who remembers more than stories. All the news coverage, all the glamourized reporting will end up looking like some sick reality TV show.
It already does, and many of the dead aren't even buried yet.