May 31, 2006

Merapi updated, thoughts about repression

I'll start this post out with an update on my speculations on the two earthquakes and the Merapi eruption.
I have been looking a bit on the reports from the two earthquakes, the one on the 26. of may might have been directly associated with the eruption of Merapi as the summary also says:

From presently available data, we do not know if there is a direct link between the May 26 earthquake and the ongoing eruption of the volcano Merapi which is several tens of kilometers to the north.

while the second big one on the 28th seems not to be directly linked to the Merapi eruption as it is far to far away and deeper .~50km compared to the first one which was very shallow at ~10km, to me it seems very likely that all three event are associated with the same plate movements and are in this way connected, but a direct link does probably not exist between these three events in Indonesia even though it might exist between the two of them.

Anyhow that is enough geological mumbo jumbo for now, most of my readers probably have stopped reading this post (but hopefully not my entire blog) by now.

It is kind of scary how easy it is to forget all the suffering that is happening because of these events when I start studying them like I have been doing for the last few hours. I feel deeply sorry for all the animals, people and beautiful nature that has suffered because of these earthquakes, but when I only work with geological terms and numbers them this damage slips away from my mind. In a way this is a good thing, being able to not think of all the suffering makes it easier to live through these difficult times for our planet and for humanity, but still it is also scary.
I don't think Hitler would have been able to do what he did, killing so many people if not people had this ability to repress the suffering and just look at the numbers etc. without thinking about what is lying behind the numbers. How would a general ever be able to order an assault if he thought about the human suffering it would cause, if he thought about which of his soldiers, his friends, he would never see again?
This ability to ignore what lies behind the numbers and technical terms might be necessary in the world we are living in right now, but it sure isn't anything I want to train.
After all this is kind of the same thing that is often done to teach a soldier to kill ... He is being asked to shoot again and again at figures of men, teach him that they what he is shooting at is not a human like himself, it's just a piece of wood.
When he then when getting out in a war situation shoots a silhouette of a man like he has been taught and have done hundreds of times in training, from then on he is a killer. Which is what the power somewhere there behind the wars, the political and religious powers of this world wants and needs.

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