"It is a day that has started with knowing that tanks are about 50 feet from my house.
How bad can it get, I mean really, after that one?"

Sometimes you just need to see someone say something that puts it all in perspective. I figured I should count myself lucky that I can't truly understand what that's like, that my middle class heterosexual white male American scale of experience (and I've been exceptionally lucky even for a MCHWMA) doesn't reach that far.

So I went to read about it in the Post, so I'd at least know what was going on even if I couldn't really understand or feel it. And what do I notice when I get there? This. So all of a sudden I'm whipping out the atlas and running an image search on Google to see if I'm right in thinking that the Dead Sea is normally one body of water, not two. And wondering what sort of processes -- climate change? increasing withdrawals for urban drinking water? irrigated agriculture? -- are causing the sea to shrink, and how they may be similar to what's happening to the Aral Sea, and what the implications are for the Israeli/Palestinian/Jordanian environment. Completely forgetting the 17 people who died today.