Thursday, June 05, 2008

I was reading PopCandy today, and came across this website that's like a gut-punch. A Chinese cartoon artist has created comics telling personal stories coming out of the earthquake. I can't begin to describe the power in his artwork, so I'm just going to put up the link here and encourage everyone to go to it.

By telling people's individual stories, it transcends the news and becomes real - it's not just anonymous faces that we're half a planet away from; it's a mother's last message to her child; it's the dedication of a teacher to his students; it's the policeman who has to make an awful decision. We have common ground to connect on, to empathize with.

We can discuss in the comments. I warn you, have tissues available. It's not light reading, but it's important reading.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Roe,
We had a similar earthquake in 1995 in Hyogo prefecture where is only about 1 hour train away from where I live, I heard lots of stories like that. For example, there's this family. Their father was stuck in the collapsed house. He was alive, but they could not help him out coz his legs were trapped in the rubble. Then the fire started. They tried to pull him, they threw sands to put the fire out that was getting close to him. But it didn't work at all and he told his children and his wife to go, without looking back.
...There are millions stories like this here and there.

I've already donated some money to China.

Knitting it Out in an Urban Zoo said...

Thanks for reminding us that the "news" is about people. In this day and age, it's easy to gloss over the human stories.