Catastrophes, cultures,and the angry earth assigment Essay

Catastrophes, cultures,and the angry earth assigment - Essay Example It was a leap backwards to history. An earthquake took the imperial Japan to a century back! No buildings stood high in Tokyo’s frightened streets. No one held their heads high there either. Even the gloomy sky was full of dark monstrous smoke clouds. Everything stood on its head after a monster from deep beneath Izu Oshima Island in Sagami Bay paid its deadly visit to the mainland Japan. The invisible waves simply took nearly hundred and fifty thousands human lives with it. The human might that built the great cities of post-World War I was no match for the mighty shake of the earth. Tokyo and Yokohama were no more cities but piles of rambles. The temblor stole the all-life labour of millions of toiling masses. Even the wealth of royals and the elites were not spared. The fire which spread from house to house sucked up everything in its way. Capitalists and labourers went together along the line of fire. Even the pet dogs ended up with a small meek voice. September 1, 1923 ma rked the end of Japan’s deeply entrenched romance with wooden houses. Two million homeless people shivered on the streets as did their houses earlier in the day. Death and destruction triumphed over the wreckage. Displacement was at its zenith; of people, statues, landscapes, railway tracks, buildings and so on. There was no one remaining without cursing their fate. There was no one remaining not fearing the wrath of mother earth. ... Slabs of plaster left the ceilings and fell about our ears, filling the air with a blinding, smothering fog of dust†. The monster that came as invisible waves from under the earth swallowed whatever existed over the earth. After the frightening ten minutes, to add oil to the fire, there were more than two hundred after shocks. And, another three hundred aftershocks in the next couple of days. The catastrophe did not end with earthquakes, fires and tsunami. At many places, the earth was literally lifted high. The shape of the shorelines changed. The ground was dramatically uplifted and depressed. Hundreds of landslides gulped scores of villages. An immense mudslide simply buried a village called Nebukawa in Idu province besides killing hundreds of people. The conflagration that followed the earthquake was not easy to contain. The victims who trapped in the rabbles were buried alive by the fire. Both the cities of Yokohama and Tokyo were under fire for next two days. Coal and cha rcoal stoves, which then were widely used, provided the necessary link for fire from one house to another. The fire was coupled with the improperly stored chemicals and fuels. More than forty thousand refugees were killed by the skyline fire at the Military Clothing Depot in Honjo Ward alone. Fire and wind played hand in glove and neighbourhood after neighbourhood fell like dominoes for the flames. Especially in Yokohama, the fire was more villainous than the earthquake in taking the tolls. Nearly seven hundred thousand houses were fully or partially destroyed. After the earthquake, the water shortage spread like wildfire, leaving the possibility of fighting fire in complete vein. Moreover, telephone and telegraph communication

Policy Choices Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Policy Choices - Essay Example Coming to an individual, what are the factors that influence actions of self interest Basically, individuals are goal oriented, and as such, they depend on their skills and resource to achieve their goals. Also, in order to achieve his goals, an individual may look for information, evaluate alternatives, and choose the ideal option. In the absence of these, there is manipulation due to lack of information and ignorance. There are also other factors involved in the process of decision making. "The rational ideal not only overstates the purity of information, it also exaggerates the rationality of the people using information. That humans do not make decisions in purely rational fashion is a point that needs no belaboring." [1] This is what Charles Lindblom has called "the preceptoral system," whereby "a system of social control is exercised by a highly unilateral governmental persuasion addressed not to an elite or to a bureaucracy alone but to an entire population" [2] "While the individual in the rational ideal is autonomous, free to deliberate and choose on the basis of accurate information, in the preceptoral system the individual is a puppet whose mind has been invaded by others and who acts as though he or she chooses voluntarily but is in fact directed from without." [3] The practice of restriction or suppression of information is not only confined to totalitarian regimes, it is also practiced in the highly scientific corridors of medical research, mega business houses, the media, law agencies, political parties, and at the highest levels of the proponents of free society. [4] Nonetheless, public-interest is the result of experience and proper understanding of what the problem is and how the solution could be achieved with minimum confusion and confrontation. It involves public debate and perception, and allows for discussion and information based solutions, instead of leaving it to the discretion of a single individual. "The rational ideal, in sum, offers a vision of society where conflict is temporary and unnecessary, where force is replaced by discussion, and where individual actions are 1Policy Paradox, p314. 2Policy Paradox, Chapter 13, page 316. 3Policy Paradox, p308. 4Why Public Ideas Matter Chapter 2, page 31 brought into harmony through the persuasive power of logic and evidence. Government by persuasion brings out the highest human quality - the capacity to deliberate." [5] However, the decision making process often tend to be long and tedious on issues related to public interest. That is why sometimes it is felt that that there is the need for some element of totalitarianism in government. That is to say, it is not always necessary for government to be of the totalitarian type in order to use persuasion. "Let us for the moment, however, not make totalitarian government a necessary condition for indoctrination and so not limit indoctrination to totalitarian regimes by definition. Instead, let us regard it as a relationship in which dominant elites control people's beliefs and