A thousand feared dead in Indonesian earthquake
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 19 years ago, in 2005, on the World Wide Web.
GUNUNGSITOLI, Indonesia (Reuters) – More than 1,000 people were feared killed in a massive earthquake which hit a remote Indonesian island famed as a surfing paradise, reducing large parts of its main town to rubble.
The Indian Ocean epicenter of Monday night’s 8.7 magnitude quake was just about 100 miles southeast of the upheaval three months ago which triggered a tsunami that left nearly 300,000 people dead or missing across Asia.
— Reuters 2005-03-29: Death Toll Could Top 1,000 in Indonesia Quake
What is there to say? Ours is an old world, and full of suffering–some of it new and raw, some of it ancient and worn down into the sands, the sea, the stones. Thoughts like that may bring numbing or they may make the pain worse, but either way they are not to the point, anyway: the people who died in countries around the Indian ocean, the 1,000 or so who died yesterday in Indonesia, in another earthquake, are each and every one of them an individual person, with lives as valuable as yours or mine, and they deserve to be remembered, each of them, as they were–not as generic symbols of a fallen world. Take some time today to be still, to be silent, to give them your thoughts, to wish them peace and to do what you can to help the survivors.
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee…
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Here’s one of the earliest dissertations linking feminism and marxism: Feminism by Correa Moylan Walsh (1917)