"When All Hell Breaks Loose..."

I handle it much better now, but when I was a child I was deathly afraid of lightening, especially at night. My Mom and Dad told me that when I was but a toddler my abject fear was the result of a lightening strike that occured just across the street from where my parents and I were standing looking out our front picture window. The blinding brilliant flash and the instanteous accompanying thunderous boom scared me so profoundly that I hurled myself across the room, knocking both of my parents down in the process. I was too young then to bring to the fore now that particular memory, but the consequences of the incident obviously made a most profoundly frightening and indelible impression upon me. As a result there are a dozen or so other childhood memories involving my lightening phobia that invoke a remembered mixture of either knee-buckeling hysteria or nervous humor.

As for tornadoes, I have only been witness to one such awe-inspiring storm from afar as it tore up the uninhabited landscape along the perimeter of McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas where I was stationed in the early 70's. Someone, who obviously had little personal regard for the vastness of that region of the country, once remarked that "Kansas is miles and miles of just miles and miles." Fortunantely this observation of fact proved of benefit on the day of that particular tornadoe's appearance, as for all its sound and fury it merely meandered across the open planes reeking havoc only upon some pour farmer's early summer wheat fields. While living in Lebanon, Tennessee I was on the outskirts of an unseen tornadoe that was striking at that moment in Mount Juliet approximately 20 miles to west of my location where I had hurriedly stepped outside to lower my garage door before the arrival of a most fierce thunder storm overtook my location. Just as I had all but closed the door a terrific gust of wind suddenly lifted the door with me firmly attached and flung me across the backyard. The tornadoe to my west was sucking all of the air into its core for miles around. I managed to secure the door and hurried into the house hoping and literally praying that I would weather this storm without further incident. I did, although my nerves were still frayed long after the departing thunder had rumbled its last.

I relay my brief personal encounters with nature's wrath as a reflection upon the death and destruction that visited five of our southern states last evening when untold dozens of deadly and destructive tornadoes visited their terrifying hell upon the unwitting lives of the communities arrayed in their paths. Thus far the death toll stands unsteadily at 52 with untold additional injured. I can only begin to barely imagine the indescriable terror that clutched at the throats and hearts of these poor souls as they heard if not actually saw the raw devasting power of the swirling rage racing toward their front doors. Nothing...nothing, in my opinion, can possibly be more paralyzing to rational thought than to stand helplessly on the threshold of an advancing storm bodding mass destruction. What does one do? Where does one go? "Dear God in heaven, help us!!" I hear the cries of those who survived. I morn the cries for the loved ones lost.

Joseph Stalin, the satanic and despotic ruler of Russia in the 19th century, who callously authorized the cruel and inhumane deaths of millions of his own country men, women and children, penned the following: "The death of one man is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." The English poet John Donne had a far fuller understanding of the interlaced dependencies we humans have on one another. "The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that this occasion would wrought him, he is united with God. Who casts not his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occassion rings? But who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of this man." Mr. Donne realized what Stalin could not...that every injury...every death...rises far above a cold statistic by those who bear the pain of such loss. And each of us must not allow ourselves to become callous in our reflection upon the tragedies of others. They each, as one soul to another, deminish each of us as well.

God be with these souls who were visited last evening by a calamity that has no name but saddness.