Posted on 12/29/2004 9:30:10 AM PST by zetapsi
It was the best of days. It was the worst of days. Not in recent history has a twenty-four hour span brought such bipolar emotions. In Ukraine, a tormented people exercized their freedom and elected Viktor Yushchenko, a maverick reformer who has pledged to fight the Kremlin’s ambitions to reinitiate Soviet Imperialism. But just a few thousand miles away, tens of thousands of people were perishing at the hands of Mother Earth. A tsunami from an earthquake has now killed what (current) estimates show to be over 44,000 people from Sri Lanka to Thailand to Eastern Africa. This is roughly fourteen times the amount killed on 9/11.
In Ukraine, after the second round of elections on November 21, hundreds of thousands of people draped themselves in the color orange and peacefully protested in the streets of Kiev. They were protesting the results of the second election that showed incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich prevailing 49-46% over Yushchenko. This election was held because the first one (where Yushchenko was the winner) was not determined as valid because of intimidation and fraud. After the incumbent was declared victorious in the second election, a grassroots support effort grew exponentially in sure hopes that this election was a fraud. This turned into a groundswell so large that both sides of the political isles in Europe and America were encouraged to wear orange (the color of Yushchenko’s Campaign) ties in their respective halls of Congress.
Virtually overnight, hundreds of thousands of people amidst the demands of their own lives descended upon Kiev and set up shop for the largest filibuster in recent history. Once Yushchenko stated his intentions to contest the results and to pursue having another election, he was poisoned with dioxin. Just by looking at his face, one can see that over the course of two days he went from looking great for his age at 50 to looking terrible for his age at about 90. The Ukrainian Supreme Court, as well as numerous World Bodies, ruled that the election had been fraudulent, and it didn’t take a gumshoe to follow the clues to Moscow.
After a comparable occurrence in the country of Georgia, it was seen that the rumors that the current President, ex-KGB, Vladimir Putin’s ambitions of recreating the Soviet Union were not just rumors. Ukraine and Georgia are the two largest independent countries that were then apart of the Soviet Union, and it was logical for Putin to start there to break ground on a new Communist Block. The Ukrainian people rejected this resurgent Communism in the most fitting way of all…with their vote. By electing Yuschenko, they have stated their wish to be more closely aligned to Europe than to Russia. This is a major victory for the U.S. and the rest of the world. It proves that the Soviet Union is dead forever, and any infantile temper tantrums of former Communists are futile, as their terror will now reside in the annals of history because the people they terrorized will never stand for it again.
On the other side of the spectrum of human emotions and worldly events, thousands of people perished in a natural disaster of biblical proportions. As most in the U.S. slept off a blissful end to the holiday season, tsunamis generated from a 9.0 earthquake ripped through the Indian Ocean at what some reports have recorded as 500 nautical miles an hour. At 100 feet in height, these “waves of death” slammed the Pacific Basin and the many isles that inhabit the Pacific. The island of Sri Lanka is now believed to have lost near 20,000 people, almost 8% of its total population. The countries of India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, numerous countries in Eastern Africa and others have lost an estimated 44,000 at the point of this being written. The Pacific Basin is accustomed to violent waters and the like, but the last time the world saw devastation like this from tsunamis was in 1883.
Unfortunately, each day that passes brings a new estimate of the damage. Just since I began to write this, the total has climbed from 23,000 to 44,000 and some are even estimating around 60,000. Perhaps even more jarring is that the conditions of Sri Lanka and some other countries may conceivably create even more costly upsurge. With the lack of fresh water and sanitation, water-born illness epidemics could cause yet even greater destruction to an already battered continent.
Foreign aid has been pouring into this region since this atrocity occurred. Let us hope that this will bring the international community together that will be above the politics of bitterness and naysaying, and they will work collectively to help rebuild this quadrant of the earth. Often enough, tragedy can bring understanding. When earthquakes destroyed parts of China from 1926-1970, killing an estimated 650,000 people, we saw them as a country in need and saw past the political differences. Just a year ago, when an earthquake hit Bam, Iran, the U.S. immediately sent aid to perhaps our most clear enemy. In this current tragedy, perhaps Pakistan and Afghanistan can help India, and feuding tribes can come to peace in Sri Lanka. Maybe Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka will accept aid from Israel. There is a myriad of possibilities for the way a tragedy such as this can help us temporarily bury political hatchets and help one another.
In some hearts, December 26, 2004 will be remembered as a day that a proud nation proclaimed its allegiance to freedom and rejected tyranny. But in all hearts, that day will serve to humble mankind and remind us of our own vulnerability and mortality. Today we encompass the entire spectrum of human emotions. For on this day, we celebrate with a triumphant symbolic group who fought for freedom, but we solemnly mourn and weep with the masses of the effected whose losses transcend all inventions of the human theatre.
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