i watched World News Australia today. I couldn't stop crying. My God, how can we live like this? How can i live like this? bodies, pale and bloated in the water. Everywhere, floating. A thirteen year old who clung to a tree for fourteen hours as he watched his entire family being washed away. A father, collapsing, eyes hollow, stumbling as the people around hold onto him; his child has been found in the ruins of the school, the epicentre of the earthquake. Parents, waiting, waiting. A young boy, who had to have both arms amputated, otherwise he wouldn't make it. He pleaded that he could keep one, just to hold a pen.
how can we live like this? fuck, we're too trivial.

but the wheel turns, and the world revolves, and it doesn't stop for anything.

it makes me want to give up everything, everything i have ever owned, empty my whole bank account...just to save one. Why can't i? i give myself the pitiful excuse that the money might make me able to help more people in the future than a couple of thousand dollars could ever do. But i don't trust myself. I don't have the skills, and i don't have the compassion.

fuck millionaires. how can they live with themselves, with their accounts bursting- don't they know that if they gave up their aspirations for that porche, they could've made a mother smile? Why? WHY

but then...i am rich. i go to a fuckin private school. We're renting, we can't even buy a house of our own, but we're still well off. There's no denying that. For God's sake.

Rescuers at China quake epicenter, digging by hand
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080514/ap_on_re_as/china_earthquake

"HANWANG, China - Soldiers rushed to shore up a dam cracked by this week's powerful earthquake, and rescuers came by helicopter and ship Wednesday into the isolated epicenter but still were forced to dig for survivors with their bare hands.

Nearly 26,000 people remained buried in collapsed buildings from Monday's magnitude 7.9 earthquake, and the death toll of almost 15,000 was expected to climb as relief operations spread into the mountains of Sichuan province. The quake triggered landslides that blocked roads to hardest-hit areas.

Even as the rescue effort seemed to gather momentum — speeded by clearing weather after two days of rain — caring for tens of thousands of people made homeless across the disaster zone have stretched thin the government's resources.

Homeless victims begged for aid on roadsides, and people settled in for a third night in a growing sprawl of refugee camps littered with garbage. In Hanwang, a town in one of the hardest-hit counties, survivors stood hoping for handouts from cars, jostling with each other to reach to one vehicle where a passenger passed bottled water out the window.

"I'm numb," said Zhao Xiaoli, a 25-year-old nurse working at a makeshift triage center in tire factory driveway. "The first day, hundreds of kids died when a school collapsed. The rest who came in had serious injuries. There was so little we could do for them."