Instinctive caution, instilled by a quarter century as a journalist, cautions me against using the word “best,” especially regarding the Internet, a place where voyages of discovery take place daily. But if you are looking for pictures from key news events, it will be hard to do better than the free pictures uploaded by the Boston Globe, at www.boston.com/bigpicture.
Most news sites post only versions smaller than could be found on the back pages of any respectable print publication, but here the Globe has placed pictures that fill my screen—about the size of an 11 by 8 and ½ inch piece of paper. These are arranged as photojournalistic feature stories, with multiple images of such things as the bombing of Daffy Khadafy’s forces in Libya, the last Discovery space shuttle flight (including amazing shots inside and from inside the International Space Station), and the quake/tsunami in Japan. Not everything is covered, and some of what is covered seems pretty tangential to the major news (an Alaskan dogsled race?), but what they choose to covered is done so definitively.
Seeing scarcely believable images of the devastation wrought in Japan, I had struggled to find a word adequate to describe them. Today, looking at the Big Picture images, I arrived at one: slaw. A modern country in which Iwate prefecture was turned into wood, steel and concrete slaw. The Richter scale for earthquakes is a logarithmic scale, meaning that an 8.9 quake like Japan’s is nearly a hundred times worse than what hit Haiti, assuming reports are correct that pegged it at 7.0 rather than 7.3.
If we think The Big One predicted for California will have a different outcome than Japan’s, we’re lying to ourselves. Beyond any “issue” in politics, this country needs to reorient its fundamental strategy to prepare for disasters—as Joseph advised Pharaoh to do in the Old Testament, warning that his dream in which the seven lean cows ate up the seven fat cows meant that a period of good crops would be followed by a long famine. Pharaoh heeded, set up granaries, and that was why the Joseph’s brothers came to Egypt, because the land of the Nile had food. “Just in time” delivery of raw materials may be good as a way to maximize industrial productivity and profits, but it fails completely when a natural or human-induced (or both at once, as in the intensity of weather events brought on by climate change) disaster strikes. The good side of this is, a national consensus on the need to make present sacrifices to prepare for future dire conditions would at least set us on the way toward the kind of shared sacrifice we need to survive in the new, more hostile environment to come.
As much as to say, that’s the Big Picture
Comments