Madness of All Kinds

My seven-year-old was briefly leading all thirteen teams in our family basketball bracket challenge after the first round of NCAA games. He somehow picked the Louisville loss to Morehead St. - sheer luck, perhaps, but after seeing his wall-to-wall grin I had to offer my congratulations. He's fallen in the standings today, but we cheered him up by saying that at least he's ahead of a few teams. No one likes to be down and out.

The madness on the other side of the world - the horrendous earthquake, tsunami, and related nuclear meltdowns in Japan - remind us even more poignantly of this fact. The magnitude of the disaster is so great, the suffering and anxieties grow at such a rate every day, that I want to look away. Much easier to focus on basketball wins and losses than on radation exposure, tent cities, and food scarcity in Japan.

Jim Wallis wrote about this in an excellent blog post for Sojourners:

"There is no satisfying theological explanation of why such things happen; the earth shifts and the oceans rage. Why here? Why now? Nobody really knows. In a very sad way, these catastrophes bring people together. Around the globe, people have been moved to help. It’s often somebody else’s pain and loss that reminds us of what is important and what is not — and even what it means to be human.

Of course, there is a very human temptation to just turn off the TV, to shut off your heart and your mind, and say that it is all just too much to take in. Yet, the images that are hard to see and the stories that are hard to hear are often the ones that change us most, and indeed they should. As a Christian, I don’t have easy answers to this kind of human suffering, but I believe it breaks the heart of God — and that means it should break our hearts too. We should feel pain when we see others in pain." (http://blog.sojo.net/2011/03/17/we-must-pray-and-act-for-japan/)

So I'll keep watching, donating to the Red Cross, and discussing the news with my children. My daughter is doing a reading unit on Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes for school, and she cut out an article from our paper this morning which described the efforts of Denver school students to make origami paper cranes to send to students in Japan after the tsunami. Hopefully she can get a similar effort started at our local elementary school. My little guy walked the big kids to their school this morning, through a lovely inch of spring snow, and when I commented that it was also snowing in Japan, where many people were homeless, his brow furrowed. "That's not good," he said. "I am going to make a picture for Japan." I told him I thought it was an excellent idea.

Long after the NCAA tourney is over, the world will continue to offer random crazy and shocking events. It's hard to look at the madness, but I do agree that it's important. Hopefully we can strengthen each other as we look together, and act together in support of those who really need it.