Feeling Human Fragility during the Most Massive Earthquake in Japan

"A magnitude 8.8 quake hit the ocean 80 miles from the Japanese coast, sending 10 meter waves toward the shores..." so read the calm news broadcaster as silence feel across the workplace. Forced smiles of optimism turned into stoic acceptance of reality while the mind of every person remained 100% occupied by mentally preparing for the next aftershock...and the next aftershock came, stopped, and came again....even now, as I write these words.

Friday March 11th, 2011: recorded as the most seismically active day in a country known for being one of the most seismically active places on Earth. All trains, ships, and planes come to a halt in a place where public transport is pretty much the norm for everyday life, throwing everyone into the streets, packed with cars and pedestrians in a way reminiscent of my recreational travels in urban China.

The power of Mother Earth is once again proven to be unparalleled. And some humans have tried their best to protect Her and keep Her in Her best conditions. But as thousands of people jammed the normally empty streets to head home, I (and we) cannot help but sigh at our own uselessness in the face of unpredictable powers of nature. As the ground shakes below us, all our conspicuous wealthand cutting-edge technology means absolutely nothing and can help us with nothing.

So the humans went back to the basics: their own feet and their ability to walk long distances. But even as our intelligence at tool-making proved absolutely no match for nature's power, some people remained determined to put the power of human lives above nature. To hide the sudden helplessness they felt, the salary-men walking home in groups spoke of how their workplaces are quake-proof and how nothing will go wrong when they get home.

It was a classic display of human focus on their own well-being. To suppress their worries and enlarge their own self-importance (even in the face of omnipresent and omnipotent power of nature), some turned to picky consumerism while others turned to overly "magical-sounding" religion...there is nothing wrong with either of those, but at this moment in time, they just act as other forms of reality escapism.

It is all a self-trained reflex. When humans are exposed as fragile beings helpless in the face of adversity, they do their best to hide their fragility with overt gestures of self-grandeur. Even when a few brave souls refuse to follow along with the self-grandeur, they tend to explain unconquerable supra-human forces in human terms, something that we labelled philosophy, psychology, and even divination...

But as Japan and the world mourns the death of 40-some residents and brace for more deaths as the missing are found and tsunamis continue to strike, the primary realization should be one about the fleeting nature of human lives and how each human life actually means so little in the eyes of Mother Earth. Mother Earth will not stop and say sorry for the damages done, and She definitely will not spare anyone or any place deemed "special" due to exceptional wealth, socio-cultural value, or prestigious status.

So what are we to do? Not much, really. Materialism can be destroyed at any moment, so are technology and monetary wealth. While human progress is often defined by the abundance of those elements (and progress, of course, is necessary to improve the livelihood of humans), should not the focus be more on how to strive forward continuously amidst Nature's violent bouts? Even if we do not sacrifice human welfare for good of Nature (as environmentalists would like to say), shouldn't we design our societies to minimize physical and mental damages from Nature, so humans can be less...ehh....fragile?