Survivors pulled from rubble of China quake

"I've been coming here every day, sitting here in the early morning, waiting," she said, weeping. "He's been missing for more than three days now. But for my son I would come every day."

We have a tendency to not see others as we see ourselves. It is perhaps my greatest failing and one I'm trying to overcome on my slow slog toward human beingness.

Americans don't care much for anything not American (unless it can be marketed as something 'exclusive' or better yet, 'decadent').

Currently, along with the French, the Chinese are thought of as less than human by much of America.

They're flooding our markets with cheap crap, they're manipulating their currency to keep it's value high against the Dollar, they're using all of 'our' oil for their industries.

They're beating monks and imprisoning dissidents and suppressing practicioners of Falun Gong.

But there is nothing in the stories and photos piping back into our media regarding the devestating earthquake in central China that is anything but raw humananity.

People in this officially non-religious culture were still lighting incense and setting off fireworks to frighten evil spirits from the bodies of the dead.

The Chinese are weeping for their losses and angry over the seemingly lax seismic code enforcement in the region. They are dazed and hungry and thirstyand weary and feel lost at having been suddenly thrust into an uncertain future.

If, as I wrote below, disasters remind us that life is too short to spend it being afraid to live, then disasters also remind us that we are all the same once we strip away our governmental trappings.