On Sunday the 26th of December, I remember sitting safely at home and watching events unfold on television. In the early hours of that Boxing Day morning, a powerful earthquake centred in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Indonesia brought a new word to the vocabulary of many Westerners ... ‘Tsunami’. Shocking as it was, the true scale of that disaster was not known for days and I doubt that even today it is fully understood. From the tourists on the resort island of Phuket we saw movies of first the vanishing Ocean and then the building of the inevitable wave, the Tsunami. Within hours, News Teams from around the world were on the ground and sending us footage of the disaster. Phuket, western Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the east coast of India were devastated and more than a hundred thousand people were killed. The longest coastline in that region, and directly in the path of the tsunami, was Myanmar. Myanmar was, and is, a virtually closed state and the true extent of what happened there we will probably never know.
The tsunami that hit Japan on Tuesday was probably of a similar size, but for the very first time we were able to witness in real time the truly destructive force. Cars, boats, aeroplanes and buildings were seen being picked up like children’s toys and swept miles inland by the wave. Anybody watching it, and I suspect that most of us were, must have been touched by its awesome and unstoppable power. 
If humans have been on this earth for a couple of hundred thousand years, then in the last two hundred years we’ve developed beyond all recognition. We’re the smartest things ever to have inhabited this planet, possibly any planet, and we kid ourselves that we’re in control of our own destiny. We laugh at ancient civilizations who worshipped the Sun and the Elements and claim that we understand science and that makes us somehow smarter than our ancestors. If the tsunami that hit Japan shows us one thing, then it’s that we’re absolutely insignificant, we’re just ants who can drive cars ..... full of bullshit and hubris.
If the lifespan of this planet is represented by the length of the M1 Motorway, then Man’s entire existence on this planet would be a the width of a pussy hair on a single cats-eye in time. We're not even a dime in Bill Gates' pocket. If we’re really as smart as we’d like to think we are, then we’d learn to work with and around the unstoppable force of nature and never try to fight against it. Man can fight wars with himself but he can’t win a fight against nature and entropy ..... never could and never will. The Mayan and Aztec people seemed to be aware of the Pacific Ring of Fire, but they didn't build cities around it's edge. What happened in Japan was a natural event .... but Man made it a distater.
I don't do prayers ... but my thoughts are with those affected by the tsunami across Japan
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