:: mybackpages ::: Dots in Blue Water

An audio clip from NPR's Morning Edition from January 2005, featuring Annie Dillard, recorded a couple of weeks after the Tsunami that rounded out the year 2004. Listen here.

The reading is loosely taken from For the Time Being, written in 1999 and updated for the year 2005. A current read of mine, see pages 48, 107, 130, 131.

On April 30, 1991--on that one day--138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner that night I brought up the catastrophe. My daughter was then seven years old. I said that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.

"No, it's easy," my daughter said. "Lots and lots of dots in blue water."

She was too young then to understand the supreme importance of each individual. Those tsunami victims in Bangladesh years agoand these tsunami victims now on the shores of the Indian Ocean were not dots, sweetheart, they were beloved daughters like you, they were beloved sons. They were partners in love and fathers and mothers; every adult knows this.

It has been a stunning time for us adults these past six decades since the war. Nothing is new, but it's all as fresh for every new crop of people as this year's winter-killed grass. What is eternally fresh is our grief, what is eternally fresh is our astonishment, what is eternally fresh is our question, "What the Sam Hill is going on here?" And incidentally, is anyone running the show? Does such omnipotence mete out moral justice by hurling hurricanes here or there or pointing tornadoes or terrorists at towns. I think we cannot find anyone to make a credible case for such a proposition.

After all, even we mere people hold the individual precious, or does an individual's significance weaken with distance like the force of gravity? Well, would I exchange two Sumatran lives to save my daughter's life? Lord, I probably would. We eat at restaurants while innocent people starve in Haiti. They starve in Haiti and the Sudan too and we reach deep for as much as we can possibly spare and double that to haul humans out of the whirlpool while there is hope.

A newspaper headline said, "Head Spinning Numbers Cause Minds to go Slack." But, surely we agree our minds must not go slack, neither must our hands. We the living now enter the surf to form a human boom like a log boom. We try to encircle and enclose and bring in and burn or save the dots, all the dots. Those Indian and Indonesian dots. Those dots dropping everywhere in Iraq right now; the starving dots, we do not go slack, we secure the boom, we hold tight to other hands in the water, we save and rescue as many dots as we can whether we can see the people flail in front of us or not.

A note on 30 April 1991: Dillard was born 30 April 1945; that the tsunami occurred on her birthday speak to her remembrance of the events.