Two Weeks In Tragedy

UK box ambulance, photo by John Rumsey

With all of the attention granted to the Christchurch mosque shootings and, to a much lesser degree, the Midwestern flooding that is destroying homes and livelihoods, it would be understandable to think that you’d heard the major news of tragedy and destruction.

Sadly, this is not the case. While we focus on the cases that bring media attention, some events can pass under the radar. In this case, they don’t have a likely effect on American politics, nor do they offer us the tension and hope of a soccer team trapped in a cave. They are just tragedies.

Today in China there was a car attack on civilians. Seven people dead and seven more injured in the crash, and the police shot the driver who was armed with multiple daggers, per DW.com.

Also in China, yesterday a chemical plant exploded. While the Houston area chemical fire is unarguably an annoyance to locals, this serves as a reminder that it could have been worse.

Last week, a cyclone name Idai struck southern Africa. Such storms are typically mitigated as they pass over Madagascar, but in this case the path was unusual enough to allow it to hit with full fury on an area which was not prepared to withstand strong winds. More than 600 are confirmed dead in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. The greatest effect was on the city of Beira in Mozambique. The port city, the country’s fourth largest, was effectively razed by the storm.

Hundreds of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands more have been affected by what the UN says could be “one of the worst weather-related disasters ever to hit the southern hemisphere”.

BBC

In our own hemisphere last week, Brazil had a school shooting that ultimately resulted in ten dead and seventeen injured, according to the Rio Times. In addition to the suicides of the shooters, police have since arrested others involved in the plot.

Nearly every one of the injured and dead in each of these events shares a common trait of being an innocent victim of events out of their control.

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About AlienMotives 1991 Articles
Ex-Navy Reactor Operator turned bookseller. Father of an amazing girl and husband to an amazing wife. Tired of willful political blindness, but never tired of politics. Hopeful for the future.