Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Melt Your Heart

All last week and into this past weekend, I was complaining about what a horrible week I was having. I was behind at work, my biological father will be at my sister’s wedding, a friend I’ve been frustrated with and, the topper, I had to shave my beard. These are problems, but just how significant are they? Until early Sunday morning, I thought they were pretty big. Then I was catching up on Hypoxic’s blog, and one of his latest posts made me realize how insignificant my problems really are.

It is a post about the effects of Chernobyl. While I was alive when it happened, I don’t really know anything at all about it. I knew that millions of people had been killed and that many people were still feeling the effects of the radiation. What I was not aware of was the pure devastation that is still going on over there. That there are still millions of people that are suffering daily because of this catastrophe. It is heartbreaking to see what the radiation has done to children and that it is only going to continue for thousands of more years. Some are so deformed that they can’t walk, so they lay (and eat and everything else) on the floor all day long.

It’s easy to go about your day to day life and not think about the other people out there that don’t have it as well as we do. As I’ve said before, we’ve hit the jackpot just by being born here.

Do me a favor, go here and check out this moving pictorial essay by Paul Fusco.

1 comment:

VJnet said...

That is so heart breaking. We need to be more aware of the great risks and potential devastation that comes with things that harness and produce great power.