Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami

I want to take a short break from discussing the protests in the Middle East and Africa for just another moment.


I hope you have heard about the earthquake and how devastating it was. But I also hope you have heard about how much more devastating it would have been if not for the preparedness of the Japanese people.


The death toll is constantly rising and they are still discovering more people missing. But there is good news too. Some communities, where all the people should have been affected by the waves, are safe in very large numbers. They followed the Japanese procedures of evacuation for earthquake and they got to places of safely very quickly and avoided being washed out to sea by the tsunami.


If the waves produced from that earthquake had reached North America's and Central America's west coasts, they wouldn't have been nearly as prepared. The waves did hit the coasts, but they were not tsunami waves, so thank God. But America doesn't have the investments in infrastructure that Japan does, so had those waves happened, we would have been screwed.


I'm glad there's been so much coverage of what's going on right now in Japan. They will be reeling from this for a while, but in these current times, it makes me happy that we have more than just a global economy, we have a global community.

CNN.com and The New York Times Online both have continuously updated information about what's happening in Japan as it happens.