more on nargis

NYT

As we learn more and more of the impact of Nargis, the scale of the disaster becomes more difficult to fathom: perhaps up to 100,000 dead, millions affected.  And the Burmese junta continues to stand in the way of assistance, particularly from Western governments, but even from the ineffective U.N.

Indeed the U.N. itself has been all but whimpering and complicit in the face of such obstructionism.

Even an aid agency like World Vision, while being allowed access, having been present in Burma (Myanmar) for 30 years, has its hands tied.  Most its local workers are trained in development, not disaster relief; it needs to bring in outside help; it can't distribute the tiny, tiny trickle of aid that has already arrived. 

Burmese officials, ever the petty tyrants, have now resorted to deporting search and rescue teams.

For this reason the U.S.'s threats to drop aid by helicopter is not just welcome, but  should be encouraged.  They should just go ahead and coordinate their efforts with other countries trying to assist - in the manner we saw during the tsunami disaster with India, Japan, the U.S. and Australia taking a lead role in certain disaster areas.   Search, rescue, recovery, aid.  Do whatever it takes.

Burmese air capability is next to nothing.  Burmese military might is piffle. And if any of Burma's "friends" decide to take exception, they do so at the cost of condemnation by their own people for such inhumanity.

And where's Rudd? The "good neighbour"?  What are we doing?  What are we prepared to do?  What's $3 million gonna do?  It's not even going to upset China.

On the theology of disasters: First Things reposts a March 2005 essay by Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, written soon after the December 2004 tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean: 

I do not believe we Christians are obliged — or even allowed — to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes — and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Hope, not vain optimism. 

Which is why in the face of suffering, we protest against those who do nothing, who abandon others to the grave.  For to do nothing is inhuman.