(HOST) According to commentator and former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, the sheer size of the disasters in Myanmar and China make it a challenge to comprehend on a human level.
(KUNIN) When many thousands – and possibly millions – died in Myanmar and China as a result of a cyclone and an earthquake, it was hard to imagine the extent of the tragedies that had snuffed out so many innocent and unsuspecting lives.
The people remained numbers swimming in our heads, and no matter how hard we tried to picture them we could not, because numbers cannot convey feeling. It is not until someone extracts a few individuals from the large numbers that we can begin to imagine their grief.
No matter how large the numbers are – six million, one million, 15,000 – the voices on television or the radio recounting these deaths must remain cool and distant. That is their job: dispassionate reporting.
Last week, in the account of the earthquake in Szezuan Province in China, we heard a different voice telling a different story. Melissa Block was in China preparing another story when the ground shook beneath her feet.
"My goodness," Melissa Block was heard to say, as the ground kept undulating. "Could this be an earthquake?"
She then described the bodies of the little children who were being carried out of the collapsed middle school, and her voice was less steady, more taut, than that of any news reporter I had ever heard. She sounded like she could not believe what she saw, a pained surprise inflected her voice – so many dead children? How could there be so many? For the first time, I understood what the earthquake had done.
The New York Times tried a similar approach three days after the quake – showing a young couple, their heads bent together over the bruised body of their eight year old daughter. "She is our only child," her mother said.
It is the only child that enables us to share grief, not the 15,000 estimated dead in China or the possible million people dead and dying in Myanmar from the destruction of the cyclone and subsequent lack of water, food and shelter.
We live in an age when science has advanced so far that we’re deluded into thinking we’re able to prolong life to such an extent that we can conquer death itself. It comes as a terrible shock to learn that raw and unpredictable Nature remains a mighty force, tearing down mountains, sweeping in seas, without warning, without reason.
We succeed in reaching out to those afflicted when we can see two people, cradling their only child – when reporters like Melissa Block on National Public Radio relinquish their dispassionate voices while giving us the news, and dare to express their own grief.