Make Wise Decisions When You Can

When I woke up Sunday morning, I heard on NPR (yes I listen to NPR, can't help it, I'm a news junkie) that an earthquake, with a magnitude of 8.9 on the Richter scale, had claimed 1,700 lives. Eight hours later the toll was up to 7,000, and now reports say that as many as 44,000 were killed by the Tsunami's that were created by the Earthquake, with the toll steady climbing.

Needless to say, I was incredibly saddened to hear of such a tragedy. I cannot begin to fathom such devastation. Furthermore, I was sickened to hear that most of the lost lives could've been saved had there been some warning device in existence. Although the waves which claimed so many lives were traveling at an astonishing 500 miles per hour, it has been reported that there were at least 2 hours between the time they formed and when they reached land. Even a 5 minute warning could've saved thousands of lives.

So, in times like these, it only amplifies a personal cadence of mine that I truly try to live by. "Make the wisest decisions possible when you can, because there are so many things that can happen to you that you will never be able to foresee." My personal cadence isn't unlike the adage "Failing to plan is planning to fail." And is reminiscent of the childhood fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper.

It is the reality of today's tragedy that brings that cadence to mind because I do not feel that United States of America has acted very wisely in the last 3 years (at least). Today, there are tens of thousands dead, millions homeless, and nations needing billions of dollars in aid. Unfortunately, because we chose to foolishly pre-empt a war with a nation that posed no threat to us, we cannot offer the kind of assistance to those ravaged countries that we should be offering them in this time of need.

We've allocated well over $120 Billion to the War in Iraq, but this morning, I heard that we only donated $4 million dollars to the Red Cross to aid the countries that were affected by the tsunami's. Our total aid package for tsunami victims is up to an underwhelming $35 million.

How sad?

I heard Colin Powell say that the US isn't "stingy," in response to criticism from one of the head aid enumerators who thought the US could do more. He's right, we're not stingy, we're just foolish. We are so far in debt ourselves that it wouldn't make sense for us to offer much more aid. Honestly, you would expect more from the richest nation in the world, but financial mismanagement has been a staple of our current administration, and so we can't feasibly do nearly as much as we should.

I'm not going to spend the time to explain the depths of our financial crisis as a country in this particular blog (you know, the whole plunging "$" value and the very significant trade and budget deficits). But I will just make the point that our $120 Billion spent on Iraq would have been much better spent on people who need it (like those suffering in the Indian Ocean today) as opposed to spending it by killing over 30,000 Iraqi's who posed us no harm.

And the significance is that we chose to waste money in Iraq. Now, we wish and need to be helping out, but we can't because this event was something that we couldn't predict. That is why it is imperative that we, as a nation, make wiser decisions while we can, because there will always be situations that warrant attention that we can't predict.

May God bless and watch over those affected by this tragedy.

-Maelstrom