Tragedy In Perspective

Today is the tenth anniversary of the most horrific event in American History. With nearly 4,000 lives lost from the terrorist attacks we find it hard to imagine that anything worse than that can happen. Truly for families that have lost loved once both from that fateful day and for families that have sacrificed in service to our country since it has been a great burden.

But just for a moment lets look beyond ourselves and see what else has been going on in the world. The earthquake in Japan killed 15,781 people; 4,086 people are missing, and 83,000 people were left homeless. Have we given much thought to that over the last 5 months? What have we done to honor those innocent people? Have we made any donation to those people? Have we had that tragic event play through our heads like our mental playbacks of the airplanes hitting the towers? Are we as a nation putting any time to helping those build new shelters to live in like we are putting our monies to building some new shiny office towers? It is very sad that we are a very egocentric and self absorbed nation. So many other countries dislike Americans, I wonder how much of that has to do with our selfish nature? Now don't get me wrong, I love living here and I am very grateful that I was born at such a time in such a place. To some extent the selfish self serving nature of Americans (myself included) has enabled us to become such a nation of riches. We have some of the highest living standards in the entire world. The danger is that with selfishness runs the danger of self imploding. We do need to be very cognoscente of the historic date of 9-11 and we need to understand that innocent people died because there is an element of people that will do anything to kill us, and we do need to protect ourselves from this element. But, we also need to have perspective.

Suffering is suffering and it doesn't matter if it is a child dying from hunger in Somalia, a family wiped out from a earthquake, or a Dad lost from a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

There is plenty of tragedy in the world to go around. The term "God Bless America" is used at the end of every politicians speech, and to that I add "God Bless Humanity". It's time for everyone to become involved in a global effort to to care for our fellow man, woman and child. I think one person can make a difference if they just decide there is more in life than living for oneself. Is there something small you can start with, make a commitment to do something this week, or this month. Just do something.