59,000
Probably by the time I hit "publish post" the casualty toll will have risen again.
The tsunami pictures on the wire today are, if possible, even more heartbreaking than those of yesterday. The shock of the survivors begins to melt into raw grief, and the bulldozers begin to punch through to the worst-hit areas, with photographers behind them. Meanwhile the sea casually tosses back on beaches what it raped from them Sunday.
This is a worldwide calamity. The destruction spread across a ring of nations in Asia, but the victims include a Czech supermodel (injured, boyfriend missing), Lord Richard Attenborough's granddaughter (dead), and perhaps thousands of tourists from Europe, Australia, and North America. There are pictures of little tow-headed children from Sweden or Germany walking around Thai hospitals looking for their lost parents.
The Bombay author Suketu Mehta took note of the same thing in his op-ed article in this morning's Wall Street Journal, which, alas, I can only find behind a subscription wall. He admitted to taking the frankly cynical view that the "white" faces among the victims and survivors would involve the West in a level of compassion and urgency that it otherwise would lack.
I wish I could tell him he was wrong.
The tsunami pictures on the wire today are, if possible, even more heartbreaking than those of yesterday. The shock of the survivors begins to melt into raw grief, and the bulldozers begin to punch through to the worst-hit areas, with photographers behind them. Meanwhile the sea casually tosses back on beaches what it raped from them Sunday.
This is a worldwide calamity. The destruction spread across a ring of nations in Asia, but the victims include a Czech supermodel (injured, boyfriend missing), Lord Richard Attenborough's granddaughter (dead), and perhaps thousands of tourists from Europe, Australia, and North America. There are pictures of little tow-headed children from Sweden or Germany walking around Thai hospitals looking for their lost parents.
The Bombay author Suketu Mehta took note of the same thing in his op-ed article in this morning's Wall Street Journal, which, alas, I can only find behind a subscription wall. He admitted to taking the frankly cynical view that the "white" faces among the victims and survivors would involve the West in a level of compassion and urgency that it otherwise would lack.
I wish I could tell him he was wrong.
