I turned on my television to see a city razed, a gruesome tapestry of survivors and corpses. A girl, buried under the rubble, was screaming for help; a group of men, after hours, managed to free her from the broken concrete. The reporter asked her if she had been scared, and, unconquerable, she told the camera “her heart never skipped a beat.” Many others felt no more, while those they left behind felt all too much.
Mother nature has no wrath, no anger, no hatred. She feels nothing, she is unadorned indifference. And, this makes her brute violence all the more terrifying. As Thomas Hardy put it,
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
-Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan….
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
Yet, it is this very indifference and upheaval that burned into us the passion that fires our spirit and ingenuity. We have forged ahead thus far, and we will not go quietly into the night. And, when we see our neighbors shaken, we offer a hand to steady them. Cold indifference, be damned.