Today's Asia tragedy

...gets worse and worse. Now 20000 people are reported dead.

I love the beach and plan to go again, but I'd read an article some time ago...if the water disappears suddenly, as it did in several places during yesterday's disasters, RUN, do not walk, away from the shore.

Government publications in Fiji spelled it out: don't gawk on the strand if the water disappears.

These waves travel at high speeds, and while the Pacific ocean has a warning system, the Indian ocean has none.

There is little footage of the actual waves themselves except stock footage of previous disasters because there was no warning. We don't see 33 meter high waves but we do see devastation and tragedy.

I am certain many people (especially those affected) will shun the beach henceforth. But for me, the beach is too much of a natural anti-depressant.

This monster is on the scale of the Lisbon earthquake of the 18th century, which caused Votaire to lose his religion because so many people died in church. But the precondition of life is death and no inference for or against religion can be made from these disasters EXCEPT that "we must love one another or die".

Shakespeare imagines a world, in his Histories and Tragedies, in which one man (Richard III or Iago, for example) decides to become Nature, and emulate its remorselessness, and Shakespeare then explores the spreading chaos. Through addiction or simple pigheadedness we can become human tsunamis and the "moral inference" I ponder is "well, that and September 11 suck, I should do my best to avoid making more pain to add to the sum total of pain...for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all".

It is said that a merciful God would not permit such a tragedy, but I'm like news fa lash...history is full of natural disasters, such as the Lisbon earthquake, over and above man-made disasters such as the St. Bartholomews' Day massacre of Protestants by Catholics and September 11.

Suffering and death are preconditions for human freedom. Once you started asking God for alleviation and release from natural law, then you would command Him or Her to alleviate everything, the fall of a sparrow. But such a world would be the New Jerusalem and one of stasis in which we did not build history, constituted in our flight from killer waves, wild animals, and VB-6.

What I mean is that wisdom (as in Kant) may be constituted in deep acceptance of the Given. The Given of the tsunami is that when the foundations of the earth were laid, they were upon great plates which creep along, and grind upon each other.

The athiest, who has concluded from a negative argument, from bad design (from everything from plate tectonics, to the fact that DNA codes are structured as if by a mad hacker) that an all-powerful God could not have created such a mess.

Perhaps his earth would have been a seamless sphere, minus plate tectonics.

But this is to make a category mistake, which God helpfully points out to old man Job. We're part of Creation and must view it from within, not from outside, and we're subject to its laws of death and change, in part so our children don't have to support us forever, and we can bow out at the finish with exemplary grace, making them feel guilty as hell.

The Fundamentalist wants to get outa here, and hopefully avoid what Scots Prebysterians call the bad fire. But my homey St. Thomas Aquinas celebrates the beauty of the earth including the humility of grass at the seashore, stripped as it is by the wind, and bowing in its homage.

The Fundamentalist thinks of great waves, and sea monsters, that might be encountered at the strand because the ocean is the subconscious which the Fundamentalist denies...as he does evolution with its suggestion of monkey business and unseen forces below the waters of sleep.

I ran last night down to the peaceful estuary of the Pearl River estuary, protected as it is by the great whacking, and much appreciated, land-mass of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, for which I am very thankful.

And I was thinking of popping over to Phuket for some serious beach holidaying over Christmas...

There is no safe place: I had a job interview with American Express at the World Trade Center the day before the first attack in 1993.

Fundamentalism craves release from what T. S. Eliot called the soundless wailing of grief upon grief, the drifting boat with the slow leakage but T. S. Eliot sez, there is no end but addition.

When we say as in Tolstoy, "God is Merciful" what we mean is that we'd better be.

A margin of simple humanity over and above nature is our answer to tsunamis. It's why we surf waves, purely as an end in itself. Surf Nazis must die for they are nothing more than a killer wave when the point is to ride the wave and not be one with it.