Mourning in China *

These are two images from the devastation in Sichuan province, southwestern China, from the International Herald Tribune.

Now, pity for the human toll of nature's fury is not normally an impulse we heed on Intersections. What can be done? Right now, Burma is dying. Towns in Oklahoma have been wiped out. Yet these past two days I've been walking the streets, eating, taking the train, waking up, all in a dazed sense of grief over Monday's earthquake in China. It's a total human nightmare.

A friend just sent me this, a report by NPR's Melissa Block from Duijiangyan. She comes across a couple looking for their child and his grandparents in the rubble of a collapsed apartment building. It is very, very difficult to listen to the story's inescapable conclusion.

* Here is another report from Duijiangyan, in The Guardian. Here is Jim Yardley on the anger and agony of grieving parents in Juyuan. And here is the English edition of China's official news agency, Xinhua.