In wake of recent events....

I have a cold. Really bad one. I hate being sick. So. Much. I left school early today because I literally felt death creeping up on me, and I came home, plopped down in front of the TV, and on came the news.

SURPRISE!

Holy.

Shit.

O.

M.

G.

I don't really know what to say. I literally sat there, eyes glued to the TV, for 3-4 hours. Eating chocolate cake.

Every time a natural disaster occurs, we think "How can something of this magnitude happen?" It's really hard for me to wrap my head around the statistics. You see numbers on the screen. 245,000 dead. 1 million dead. 345,000 dead. 88,000 missing. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. It's hard to imagine that each and every number in that statistic is actually an individual person with a story. With a life. It's almost inconceivable that so many people can just die. These numbers are huge.

It was Stalin who said that "When one dies, it's a tragedy. When a million die, it's a statistic." This quote is haunting, and utterly true. If I see a news story about a person who dies, it feels deeply personal somehow. A murder, a suicide, what have you. It's truly upsetting, because it gives you a name, a photograph, a story. When I see a nu

mber that huge, it's hard to wrap my head around the fact that it isn't JUST a number. So even though the deaths of millions is more tragic t

hat the death of one, it feels somehow less heartbreaking.

The other thing I find is that these disasters happen so out-of-the-blue. And each time one happens, I think, this is the worst thing that could ever happen. This is the absolute most horrible thing that will ever occur. And then, 6 months later, something worse happens. So where do we go from here? What can poss

ibly outdo the past few years? We had 9-11, Katrina, Thailand, Haiti... We tell ourselves that the worst is over, but it just keeps happening.

Perhaps the best, but also the most haunting, thing to come out of this is the massive surges of spectacular photojournalism, mostly coming in from Tokyo and other parts of Japan. I mean, the photography is truly surreal. I think that photographs are probably the most important aspect of news media. They capture moments in time, and they completely change the world. I mean, after seeing a great piece of photojournalism, who can forget it? There's the Man on the Moon, and then there's the Burning Monk in Vietnam, and of course who can forget the Afghan Girl? Or what about the Falling Man?

I don't know if it's only me, but photography leaves these imprints in my mind, in my heart. It's haunting. It can portray the most horrible moments in history in these beautiful, yet still dark, ways. It captures moments. Moments in history. The final moments of people's lives. Groundbreaking events- monumental, yet only momentary. Thin

gs that happened in the blink of an eye. How difficult was i

t to capture these moments in history? I mean, these photographers were in the middle of wars, disasters. They put themselves in the line of fire, for art. Fearless.

Here are some of my favorite photographs, to end this post.

I love this photo because it was such an important event, and this just captures to glory.

This is probably my favorite depiction of the

9/11 Attacks. It doesn't show the explosions. This man looks so peaceful, just falling. It's the last seconds of his life captured in

time.

Absolute favorite. Ever. I think it's called The Kiss, but I'm not totally sure. Supposedly, this soldier was actually just running around making out with any and every female person he could find on V-J Day. Even so, it basically captures the whole essence of the end of the war.