Tornadoes roar across the American midlands, shattering homes and dreams…
Wind-driven sea water floods the valleys of Myanmar, swallowing villages, drowning tens of thousands of Burmese, ruining the rice crop and threatening famine…
In western China, the shaking earth reduces whole towns to heaps of rubble, entombing the victims, many of them children.
The savagery of the current season has been so extreme as perhaps to convince some of the religiously faithful — whether Muslims, Christians or Jews — that we are witnesses to the beginning of the end, the End of Days.
Certainly it must seem so to the victims. One moment they were engaged in the universal trials and struggles of their lives. The next moment, all was lost.
For each one directly affected, the calamity is complete. But for the rest of us, reaction to the terrible accounts is nuanced and can be influenced by circumstances.
The wreckage left by twisters is astounding. But the event transpires in moments, the story is told by aerial photographs in the next day’s newspaper, and the number of lives claimed most often is comparatively small.
In the flooding of Myanmar, few images or firsthand accounts of the horror have found their way to the world because of the ruling regime’s initial unwillingness to unseal its borders. Thus our sense of the tragedy and its victims derives mainly from cold estimates of numbers.
But with the earthquake in China, the situation has been altogether different.
A National Public Radio reporter spent most of a day with a Chinese couple as they begged for more help and more equipment to speed the search for their small son, who had been left in the care of elderly grandparents — all three feared trapped in the ruins of a fallen apartment building.
I listened to their desperate pleas to soldiers and other rescue workers.
I heard their excited cries of new hope when excavating machinery finally arrived.
Hours into the digging, bodies were found. And just as those parents did, I waited with dread until it was determined no child was among them. They were others’ losses.
Then came another report from the wreckage.
A child, this time. And two old people — the child clasped in the old man’s arms, the old woman clinging to her husband’s back. All dead.
I heard then the cries of agony torn from the parents’ hearts.
I’d been listening on the car radio as I drove home from some errand, but I had to pull to the curb and compose myself. For I had been put in that terrible place with them, in that most awful moment.
The next day, the front-page picture in The New York Times was of a couple bending in grief over the body of their child.
And in the accompanying story by reporter Jim Yardley, a different mother and father spoke as they dressed their 8-year-old only child in pink pajamas, preparing her for cremation.
Yardley quoted the father: “She was a quiet girl, and she liked to paint. We’re putting her in these clothes because she loved them.”
Then he wrote that the father leaned down and whispered in her ear.
“My little daughter,” he said quietly. “You used to dress yourself. Now I have to do it for you.”
With these accounts out of China, the distance in miles and differences of culture between us disappeared entirely. For we are bound, all of us, by our shared humanity.
That is the power — through the written word or broadcast or in photographs — of which journalism is capable at its best. But only if excellence is demanded, and if meddling governments stay out of the way.
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