I just had a great time this weekend. Great Xmas, no logistical nightmares or family flare-ups--good food and less materialism this year. Got back a couple hours ago from two days in NYC--had a fantastic time, wonderful, superb, etc.
More later on that shit. I'm really fucking sick at heart over this tsunami. Seeing the footage and hearing the unimaginable consequences and rising death tolls only reminds me how useless I am; there's nothing I can do to help, except to send money or to pray, and what the fuck good is that? Money does what for someone whose entire village is ten miles out to sea, someone whose son and husband vanished along with their fishing boat two days ago? I could send everything I'll ever earn over there and it wouldn't do a damn thing for those people. As for prayer, a non-believer's prayers are beyond a nullity, an absurd singularity collapsed under the weight of its own insipidness.
Even if I flew over there tomorrow I'd simply be some fuckup who'd bog down their overtaxed systems even further. I have no medical skills, or counseling skills, or engineering skills, or expertise of even the slightest value which could benefit anyone after such a catastrophe. I can offer nothing--and it's simply appalling to see something like this happen to the most vulnerable communities on Earth and be in the untenable moral position of wanting to do something and knowing there's nothing I can do.
And this post exacerbates the guilt and shame, because all the stupid inconsequential things I worry about here--all the agonizing over a shitty president and moaning about my job and gossiping--all that "suffering" equals about 1 one quadrillionth of how it must feel for that grandmother I saw in a photo today, hands clawing her own temples, teeth clenched, all of her grandchildren drowned and naked and laying on the street behind her, killed by some anonymous bodily function of the earth's crust miles away and under the ocean. You take the hardest, most demanding day I ever worked, add in the day I was most sad, the day I was sickest, the day I was most angry and hopeless--roll all that shit into one motherfucking intolerable fucking day, and that grandmother had 360 of them every year her entire life; in fact, my dread combo day would likely be a cakewalk to her. She raised a family in unimaginably difficult conditions, and look at the payoff for her hardscrabble day-to-day labors. 99% of those killed and maimed or otherwise aggrieved by this catastrophe had it likewise. I wish at times like this that I believed in God, so I could say "Fuck you, God" with sincerity.
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