28 Decembe 2005 ECHOES OF AN APOCALYPSE In the laws of Physics any action, no matter how violent or destructive, results in a reaction. Sometimes, the reaction produces unexpected results. It may have taken the tragic deaths of 200,000 Asians to bring home to people in the affluent part of the globe the abject poverty and precarious existence of the majority of human beings, the less fortunate of this world. No lesson or film could have explained the huge wealth gap between global societies better then the dramatic images beamed into our sitting rooms through the latest satellite technology. This was not one impoverished village washed away but thousands of villages and towns on a 7,000 km swath of coastline. This was not a usual short span disaster but a window into a reality viewed previously only in abstract visions, isolated glimpses into a dark corner of humanity to which we paid lip service but rarely much attention.                 This tsunami has smashed deep into our consciousness. It made us conscious - at least those whose compassion is not yet entirely blunted by egotism - the forgotten and ignored majority of our fellow human beings eke out a basic daily existence (half the human race lives on less then two dollars a day) that is so precarious one wave can wash their entire livelihood and future away.                And perhaps it also made us feel how precarious our own lives are in this age of nuclear menaces and ‘permanent war,’ kindled to a large extent by the frustrations and fury of people who have nothing left to lose.               This tsunami made us reflect on our consumer-dominated life, a guilt usually expunged by minor acts of charity. But this tsunami refused to go away and leave us to quickly return to our comfortable and spendthrift ways. The images kept coming, of survivors who had lost even the very basic essentials to ensure existence: A shanty-home, a plot of land, a fishing boat, a tricycle, a change of clothing, a distant well for water, a few chicken, perhaps a pig, the vegetation and herbs which supplemented meager meals, supplied natural medicines in lieu of modern medicine no one could afford and at the same time served as fodder for domestic and wild animals. These victims were human beings, living on the fringe, perched along tropical beaches to catch a breeze in a part of the world where air-conditioning remains a distant dream. These were the mass of poor who had remained impoverished thanks to our own exploitation of their resources, in order to maintain our own comfortable lifestyle and enrich more of our own citizen with more then they needed. In these acts of methodical exploitation we always found unscrupulous and willing local help.               Sadly the two worst tsunami-affected nations had already been flagellated for years by death and destruction. Was there ever any serious international attempt or pressure to resolve a twenty year old civil war in Sri Lanka? It was left to a small nation, Norway, to make a unilateral bid to halt the slaughter. To the major industrial nations and their corporate backers Sri Lanka offered no lucrative return for intervention. In Aceh, a similar civil conflict was left to fester for a different reason: An independent Aceh was more likely to offer opportunities for foreign interests to exploit its rich oil resources. Under continued Indonesian sovereignty such opportunities appeared less lucrative.             This tsunami has given us an opportunity to redress the economic imbalance between the dominant nations and those enslaved and exploited for centuries. It should, for those with a conscience, prompt us to reevaluate our relationships and the one-sided trade and investment deals that made the rich nations richer, the poor poorer. It could, if we are really interested in a universal peace, provide the impetus to abrogate or renegotiate the unfair practice of international capitalist organizations who accumulated mega-billion dollars in profits shared only by a few privileged, profits that impoverished billions of people in the so-called third world where life can depend on the unstable bounty of the sea and the harvest of a single crop. In this Asian fringe area entire populations have starved as the result of over-fishing by corporate fishing fleets while the price of the basic staple food was driven beyond affordable heights by the avarice and monopolistic control of multi-nationals.            The tsunami may have given us another chance.  In the months and years ahead it could become a watershed in the reduction of the imbalance between North and South, unless, once again, we appease our own rapacity with another temporary act of charity.