Some days I sit down and write and others I sit down and can’t. Today feels like the latter but these are words so what you see is a contradiction. I wonder what the news looks like in America. What kind of coverage you are getting and what kind of coverage you think this deserves.
My high school was what, 2,000 students? Okay, 2,000 students. So let’s take the graduating classes of Lincoln High School from the last 20 years and drown them. Crush them under a building, a car—save the mess of thrashing limbs, debris, sea foam leaking from agape mouths and go ahead and mechanically funnel the ocean directly into their lungs—whatever. They’re gone. And mark them as tallies that'll headline. Pixilated on a TV screen, bolded in the morning paper. Somehow society makes the death of one man more personal than the death of 10,000. One man has a name, an obituary. 10,000 men have a one followed by four zeros. Things like this happen and we don’t take it personally because, well, because it isn’t. Because this is 9,800 miles, a skin color and a language away. We’ve never met these people and we never would have if they were still around. Nothing in your life changes. This morning I stood at the kitchen doorway and watched my host mother hang up the phone with a friend in Ofunato, then punch a wall.
Personal.