There but for the grace of God...

The earthquake and tsunami that wiped out much of Japan's coast last Friday are completely freaking me out. I have a hard time looking at any sort of coverage of the catastrophic damage to life and property. I've had my head in the sand all week in fact.

Why is this bothering me so much? Past disasters have found me glued to CNN, watching every horrifying minute unfold, afraid to miss any detail lest I miss some all-important lesson on life or something.

But not this time. This one scares me, and here are my thoughts about why.

So, in the past, most natural disasters have taken place in this "other" space; frequently, the victims are third world countires (i.e. the earthquake in Haiti last year, the tsunami in Indonesia in 2006). The extreme poverty itself makes natural disasters that much worse, right? So it seemed, and so I always told myself. That can't happen to me, I'd think. I live a comfy middle-class life in a middle-class neighborhood in middle-class America.

Even when Katrina ripped through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi (where I lived for a year, believe it or not), it still felt like this "other." Most of the deaths came from the most poverty-stricken areas, or to the old and infirm. And while it was tremendously sad (please, I am not callous, I promise you), and while I shed a lot of tears over the destruction of a city I love, I was still able to watch all the coverage, comfortably detached. That could never happen to me, I'd think. I'm safe in my middle-class-ness.

So there's where my problem is this time around. Japan is not third world. Japan is not poverty-stricken. Japan is one of the most developed, technologically advanced countries in the world. Their middle classes are those who have been affected by this disaster. And, in fact, it's their advance technology, in the form of nuclear power plants that are now leaking radiation, that are causing so much fear and uncertainty even after the earthquake and tsunami took their initial toll.

This is terrifying to me.

I live in my comfy middle-class world here in a coastal, Southern town. There's a nuclear power plant only three hours away from here, in Charlotte, NC. If an earthquake hit off our coast like the one that just hit Japan, that could easily be Charles, Zoe and me making headlines across the world. Nothing would keep us safe from that.

It's all very unsettling, to say the least. So I'm really struggling to watch any of the coverage. Any child could be Zoe. Any grieving parent could be Charles or me.

And to the Glenn Beck's out there, who say all these disasters are a result of people not following the Ten Commandments or something, I can only say shut up. There have been natural disasters like this occuring since long before homo sapiens walked the planet. After all, something disastrous caused the dinosaurs to become extinct, and I don't think it was their loose moral values. So please, go spout your crazy about something else for a while and leave the poor people of Japan to grieve in peace.

And if you want to see for yourself what really happened over there, my brother-in-law sent me this photo-essay today. It's the one thing I've really looked at...and yes, it made me cry.

Because seriously, there but for the grace of God go we.