Hi, kids. Hope everyone had a good Christmas. Mine was pleasant, if pretty unremarkable overall.

I’ve been thinking this morning about the tragedy that hit Southeast Asia over the holiday weekend, the massive, earthquake-generated waves that battered so many countries and claimed so many lives. I know everyone is talking about this, and there really isn’t much to say in the wake of such death and destruction that hasn’t been said already. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think I’ve got to say something. This event is too big to let it pass without some sort of acknowledgement.

Last I heard the official death toll had risen above 70,000 — that’s the population of my hometown of Riverton and several neighboring towns combined. In other words, if I lived on the Indian Ocean, every face I see during my day, every other driver I pass during my daily errands, every person who works out at my gym and uses my library and shops at my grocery store and drinks coffee at Beans ‘n’ Brews and rents videos at the corner Hollybuster — all of these people would be gone. Washed out of this world and into the next in a matter of minutes. I find myself imagining my familiar environment emptied of all those people whose names I don’t even know, whom I’ve so often cursed when I’ve been frustrated with traffic or crowds or just with the idea that my quiet rural home has morphed into a suburb. I’ve seen enough Twilight Zones and end-of-the-world movies that it’s fairly easy to picture the buildings deserted and the roads silent, but it’s a profoundly unsettling picture.

Think about the numbers for a moment. Seventy thousand people dead, and even more missing, possibly never to be found. People like you and me, filled with dreams and ambitions, strengths and weaknesses, hobbies and interests. Lifetimes of memory, triumph, pain, and, if they were lucky, love. Human beings. Just… gone. As if they never existed.

Americans aren’t accustomed to thinking about death in such large-scale terms. Even 9/11, the most devastating thing to happen on our soil for the better part of a century, was insignificant compared to what’s happened on the other side of the world. I don’t mean to minimize the horrors of 9/11 or demean the individual lives lost in the terror attacks, but in purely objective terms, 3000 people and two buildings are a mere drop in the bucket compared to what people in Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and a hundred other places with exotic-sounding names are now facing. I’ve heard that one island nation — Sumatra, I think — was actually moved 100 feet to the west by this event, and that many inhabited islands haven’t been heard from since the tsunami struck them. No one knows if the radio gear on those islands was destroyed, or if there just isn’t anyone left alive to answer.

One particular video clip keeps running through my mind as I think about all this. I’m sure everyone out there has seen it if you watch television at all: recorded from some place high up, maybe a hotel balcony, the clip begins with a mundane beach view that’s partly obscured by palm trees and more modest buildings. But then the sea rises up and flows inland, just as abruptly and inevitably as if a bubble has popped.

There are two aspects of this video that are truly startling. One is the inexorable quality of the water’s progress. There’s simply nothing that will stop it. It’s almost nonchalant, like Poseidon shrugging, horrifying in its casual dismissal of anything related to humanity.

The other thing that really penetrates in this clip is the height of the wave. It’s even with the rooftops. The churning surface of the water runs just beneath the tops of the palms. The image is strikingly similar to the big moment from last summer’s film The Day After Tomorrow, when a massive wave strikes New York City and pours through the ordered grid of city streets, filling every opening of the most familiar skyline in the world. A few months ago, this image was the height of escapist entertainment: spectacular and frightening, but safely in the realm of the imaginary. Now, however, it’s become awesomely real… and maybe that’s why we’re paying so much attention to it, because the imagery of that film is still fresh in our minds.

I know that’s a cynical idea, that we’re only watching this story because it looks like a recent movie. But let’s be honest — disasters strike the Third World with some regularity and most Americans rarely notice. It’s not that we don’t care, I don’t think, but we have little reason to pay attention. There’s no “hook” into the story, nothing familiar to us, no stakes or consequences for us. How many thousands have died in earthquakes in Eastern Europe, India and South America in recent years? How many of famine in Africa? And yet we don’t see them, generally speaking. So why do we see this one?

Another cynical answer is that some of the places that were hit hardest are big tourist stops, and that there are so many American, European, and Australian tourists among the dead and missing. Would we care as much about this particular disaster if we hadn’t heard about the little blond boy whose photo was seen by his grandfather in Sweden? Or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model who saved herself by clinging to a tree, only to lose her boyfriend in the deluge? Or the fifteen-year-old Utah girl who was vacationing in Indonesia with her father and his girlfriend and is now among the missing? Maybe we would, I don’t know. I tend to underestimate people’s nobility sometimes, and, in any event, I’m just musing to myself for lack of anything better to say…