View From the Bushes

I have a co-worker who's from Uganda. For most of last winter we car-pooled and I got to be pretty good friends with him. Enough so that I can talk intelligibly and at some length on the merits of R. Kelly and whether pedophilia has anything to do with good rap music. He sent me a link today to an article in a paper called the "East African" about the aftermath and lessons of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. I did not realize that "The rate of carnage during the 100 days of terror is estimated to be three times that at the height of the Nazi Holocaust."

I think that one of the most difficult things to maintain is a sense of perspective. My grandmother, who was born in 1912, lived through both world wars, the Spanish Flu Pandemic, spent her 20's in the midst of the Great Depression, thinks that kids today have it tougher than she did. Do we? It's hard for me to imagine that any dispassionate observer would agree with her. In other words, she's lost her perspective. I think the connection to the previous paragraph is pretty obvious.

I've always found it interesting how obscure some incredibly deadly events have become. I already mentioned the Spanish Flu, which even with the SARS epidemic is still relatively unknown, but one in particular that has always amazed me is the Tangshan Earthquake of 1976, where officially 255,000 people died but a better estimate would be closer to 655,000 people dead and another 780,000 injured. To give you an idea of how obscure that is try finding a page devoted to just that event (not part of a list) on the Internet.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross