Is it just me or are natural disasters happening a lot more often than they used to? Up here in Toronto, we can’t really complain—the latest disasters we’ve really seen are the rumblings from a 5.0 magnitude earthquake in 2010 and a 5.8 yesterday, but others across the world suffer FAR worse than we do.
For those of us not directly affected by these reminders that we’ve not TRULY managed to subdue the Earth, natural disasters are a foreign concept. I’ve seen footage on TV and read about a ton of things, but having never been through a disaster of ANY magnitude, it’s easy to spot the people like me. We’re all over the Internet. We post about it because we have nothing better to do when disaster strikes—no one to save, no relatives to check on—nothing. So instead, we joke about the situations. We blog about the situations. But because we’re not IN the situations, the very next day, life goes on, more or less unchanged from the day before.
Regardless of whether you’ll ever cross paths with a natural disaster, though,they’re nothing to sneeze at. We’ve seen what tsunamis, droughts and earthquakes can do—displacing people from their homes, massive body counts and changing the faces of nations. These are the times where we need to rally together to aid our fellow people, despite whether we live in a disaster-torn land or not.
But yesterday’s earthquake of 5.8 that was briefly felt on the eastern side of North America—while we don’t know if it’s a foretelling of worse things to come or simply a reminder that this is about the worst that earthquakes CAN get on this side of the plates, there’s one thing that we DO know for sure—that for the time being, this earthquake was little more than a pain in the ass.
236/365
