SOME OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AFTERMATH

But the government are not helping. They have issued an edict that no-one will now be allowed to build within 1 kilometre of the sea! I ask you. It builds the fear that a tsunami may wash in again any day. The truth is that's probably it for a couple more generations. It's wrong to live in fear of calamity. More importantly, the sea is Sri Lanka's livelihood: it's an island! The tourists, beaches and sea front hotels are it's main lifeline.

It's doubly stupid because there is plenty of high land near the sea and plenty of dangerously low land more than a kilometer from the coast. It's a badly thought out knee-jerk reaction that will now put thousands out of their homes. How are the fishermen supposed to function if they can't live near their boats and equipment?

Which reminds me; many people here now refuse to eat fish. They believe the bodies of the victims have been consumed by the fishes and therefore we must not eat sea food. The fishermen are despairing. I've tried to tell everyone I've met with this silly notion that the bodies are not in the sea: hardly a single corpse has been washed ashore, despite thousands of missing persons. Bodies will always bloat and float ashore after a few days; so they are not in the sea. They are in the mud and rubble, of course. Caught by the wave, a person would be rolled along over and over until dead and left in the sludge and slime as the sea recedes. Some, of course, are under collapsed masonry.

But you can see from these comments that we are dealing here with a simple people, unsophisticated and uneducated, who are also very superstitious. There is a very strong presence of masks, effigies and symbols which we would tend to call voodoo back home. Needless to say, the omen-mongers have had a field day with what the disaster really means in Cosmic terms!
 

THE ATOM BOMB THEORY

You may have heard this idea. There was a secret US underground H-bomb and that's what caused the earthquake which led to the Tsunami. The rumour is prevalent here but also one of the leading correspondents to my website has been circulating disgusting filth about the bomb being a Zionist plot ( she didn't write it but is giving credence to it by circulating it). I'm appalled that anyone so normally holistic and eco-aware should fall for this nonsense. That's how Hitler whipped up fury against the Jews: everything that was negative was a "Zionist plot".

It's not limited to that. A very senior doctor and very clever thinker in this city told me in all seriousness that it was an Indian H-bomb, detonated secretly in southern India. That's what fractured the Earth's crust nearby.

All this fuels the flames of racial divisions and hatred. It saddens me indeed, that when some of us see a need for positive survival action, others see it as an ideal chance to further their narrow bigotry and dogma.

Thought you needed to know. Now let me leave you with some clean holistic images, to sweeten your palate.