It's impossible not to be moved to tears

It's impossible not to be moved to tears

"We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression."  CONFUCIUS 

By Alex P. Vidal

Even if your heart is made of rock, it is impossible not to be moved emotionally once you see a distraught mother hysterically looking for a missing child, or a father crying unabashedly while desperately searching for his missing wife and children--all believed to have been swept away by flash floods or buried in mud when super typhoon "Yolanda" tortured Central Visayas last Nov. 8.  
It is impossible not to end up teary-eyed after watching hungry and horrified residents walking with shaggy cloths like zombies foraging for food and water and begging for immediate help; families in evacuation centers visibly shocked and tormented by nature's murderous wrath after losing their houses and livelihood.
It's impossible not to be overwhelmed by a feeling of empathy and sympathy after seeing piles of dead bodies, many of them children and elderly, scatter in the streets covered by dirt and debris; unidentified and bloated cadavers washed away by cascading waters from rivers and denuded forests.

MEDIA

It is only after media described the extent of death and destruction in graphic details that people around the world were able to absorb the terrifying scenarios in Leyte (particularly in Tacloban City), Ormoc, Cebu, Iloilo, Aklan, Capiz, Antique. So saddened they wasted no time to chip in and rushed donations in cash and kind.
We haven't seen such gigantic havoc wrought by a single natural catastrophe in recent memory. Yolanda will go down in history as the most frightful and morbid; its cataclysmic damage will be long remembered by generations to come. When historians chronicle what happened on November 8, 2013, they will describe the event in one eerie word: hell! 
Those who lost their homes and loved ones in the blink of an eye during the tragedy will think that God has forsaken them and left them to suffer in hell on earth. The faith of many of them will be put to test. They will start to question why God allowed them to suffer and why of all people on earth, such misfortune befell on them. "Why us, Lord?"

RELIGIOUS

We are aware of the immediate religious repercussions the Yolanda tragedy registered in religious as well as anti-religious circles. Let me share the lines from Voltaire's  “Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne,” written in response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 where thousands of people were killed:
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.
Tranquil spectators of your brothers’ wreck,
Unmoved by this repellent dance of death,
Who calmly seek the reason of such storms,
Let them but lash your own security;
Your tears will mingle freely with the flood.