TSUNAMI SILVER LINING

The coldest night of my life was spent in the Buddhist temple on top of this mountain: 7,360 foot-high Sri Pada in Ceylon. It’s named for the Sacred Footprint of Buddha, a depression in the rock of the summit around which the temple is built. Pilgrims come to watch the sunset and most have the foresight to bring a blanket. Having climbed up from the torrid jungle in only a t-shirt the afternoon before and lacking such foresight, I froze all the way to dawn.
Ceylon - or the official name of Sri Lanka, if you prefer - is one of the most entrancing lands on our planet. That such a place of gentle beauty should be visited by such horror as we have seen this week is an undiluted tragedy. For the people of Ceylon and their Indian Ocean neighbors who suffered the monumental horror of a tidal wave coming out of nowhere and washing away their lives, there is no silver lining. Life has the capacity to be utterly tragic with nothing to balance or outweigh it.
To argue otherwise would be to demean the suffering of the tsunami’s victims. Yet while there is no silver lining for them, there may be one for us. This numbing event may be humbling enough to teach the egomaniacs of the left that nature is a vastly greater destroyer and alterer of nature than the puny activities of man.
The Left is possessed with a peculiarly pathological form of egomania: We human beings are so immensely powerful and so immensely evil that we can threaten the entire earth! It is this nut-case egomania that fuels the religion of environmentalism.