14 March 2011

I AM HUMBLED


On the March 11, 2011 Japan quake and tsunami...


"It makes us all feel small. It makes us realize how puny even the biggest, most clever things we humans make—highway systems, skyscraping towers, nuclear power plants and so on—truly are, in the natural order. It makes us humble, giving us a better perspective of our role in nature: We may have humored ourselves and seen the human race as master of nature; in truth, elementally, we are, and have always been, at its mercy.


The terrible twin disaster in Japan gave us a heightened sense of life’s very contingency; death is only an instant away. But even more, it gave us a sharpened sense of the utter limits of our own human race. We may work as hard as we can to build ourselves up, but when the Big One hits, we are reduced to our real size." -- The Philippine Daily Inquirer, Editorial, 14 March 2011

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