Some people look for moral lessons in disasters, concentrating on a baby pulled out of the rubble of an earthquake days after it struck and calling it a "miracle." But a tsunami of the scale that crashed against the manmade seawalls along the Pacific Coast of the Tohoku region in northeast Japan left no room for morality or miracles.
This is devastation on a monstrous scale; and all that is left for this nation is to pull together and expend every possible effort to ease the plight of the survivors and begin the long, arduous process of recovery.
I have spent much time over the past 43 years in the affected area, with its beautiful little inlets and long, shallow bays widening as they meet the ocean. However, it was that very landscape that made the tsunamis more deadly.