Hello everyone On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 2:28 PM, MarshaV <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > My heart is aching for the people in Japan. I don't get the hype from > television, but I have been paying attention to events posted on the > Internet, and it is all awful beyond words. It is so awful it is hard to > believe it is really happening, yet I know it is. The question 'Why?' > sticks in my throat and I choke. It is unbearably awful.
Hi Marsha Like you I don't have cable tv so I've been following the unfolding disaster in Japan via the Internet. What strikes me most is how differently the Japanese culture handles such catastrophes as compared to our own. Take the Katrina disaster in New Orleans as an example: Rather than doing something to help themselves, most New Orleans residents affected by the hurricane seemed to sit and wait, expecting someone else (the government) to help them. There were surges in lootings and crime. Bitchings and moanings were heard throughout the city: "why us, why us". Still now, years later, many homes there are sitting empty and a third of the city's residents are gone, relocated at government expense and probably still living off government aid. In Japan, not so. Rather than sitting around waiting for help, the residents are already busy cleaning and rebuilding their homes... even elderly people. There are no reports of looting. No one taking advantage of the situation for their own gain. They're helping one another out in any way they can. One elderly couple when interviewed said they were hurrying to clean and restore their own home so that they could then help others do the same. No one is asking "why us, why us". They are simply getting on with it. Why are there such differences? I think it may have something to do with how we in the West are socially conditioned to the desire to possess value rather than realizing that that is impossible... rather, value possesses us. It struck me in my recent conversation with Ham (and in past conversations with Platt) that the desire to possess value, the love of money if you will, is indeed the source of all suffering. This is quite foreign to me personally. In the past I shrugged it off as inconsequential... that most people didn't feel that way. But more and more, I am seeing that our Western culture is infected far more deeply with this sickness (and it is a sickness, though of social significance rather than biological) than is the East. It is this negative face of Quality that we tend to mistake for better. Thoughts? Dan Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
