Speechlessness

That was a major catastrophe. It killed, even on Buddha's Day. Mother Nature has no mercy! Many were stricken speechless.

Premier Wen Jiabao rushed into the debris to help direct the mass rescue. Wen is a good premier. He is kind and caring, he is hardworking, and he is competent.
Yet he might not have got the hang of it comforting a poor weeping schoolgirl devastated by such ultimate trauma and misfortune of losing her family to something she could not possibly understand. The country needs tens of thousands of well trained professionals to do the broken heart healing jobs for years to come.
Call me heartless if I don't have tears in my eyes seeing that schoolgirl weeping just on TV.
Wen is certainly not of the normal kinds of high rank leaders on our 9.6 million sq.km motherland with a population of 1.3 billion strong. We need at least a hundred million of this kind of good and capable men and women to build and rebuild a healthy, fair, strong and wealthy China.

The Premier says, "we can surely defeat the catastrophe!"
I would boldly assert that we cannot.
That Satanic catastrophe has come and got away with it after having buried alive, slaughtered and injured so many innocent people, devasted so many homes, taking advantage of the poor quality of residencial and school buildings, in just less than one single minute! We haven't even been able to touch the tip of the tail of His Satanic Majesty.
What we must defeat is not any catastrophe we can never engage with, but the elements that breed poverty of our badly off population, and their vulnerability to all kinds of adversities including man-made ones.
Many of our poor fellow countrymen on rural lands are still living in utter poverty, sheltering in adobe huts or brick houses extremely vulnerable when exposed to all kinds of harsh elements and castastrophes that could strike all of a sudden in many parts of the country!

A friend of mine has mentioned the Myanmar typhoon and the New Orleans hurricane to dispute against some who sneered at the People's Liberation Army, accusing them of sluggish action. I found my friend a bit too sentimental doing so, and the argument is simply pointless.
We don't make comparisons with Myanmar or New Orleans. Myanmar is under the complete military rule of a regime quite so imcomprehensible. New Orleans had been a victim of racial discrimination, thus indifference. They are examples of unjustness with no room for doubt.
If we do want to compare, we'd better do with the Osaka-Kobe experience that we actually can hardly do!

According to the news, the People's Liberation Army has been doing a good job. It is just doing its job. This should be every single ordinary people's expectation. They are the army after all. That's what an army is meant to be. The people thank them, and may even praise them a bit. Yet there are some extremely patriotic people who worship them, they would find it offensive hearing someone critizing or sneering at them. Such behavior might have contained unnecessarily too much sentiments.

My friend also mentioned that the PLA Airborne Force had lost 4 of their men with 10 still missing. If this did happen, it only implies that they might not be well prepared for the rescue mission. These well trained and most valuable men are supposed to keep themselves alive till the end in order to rescue as many helpless people as they can, and not to sacrifice so soon. A rescue team must have a collective cool mind. They should never do the job as if they are fighting in a battle as martyrs facing a well equipped enemy!