Quintin Jardine's blog

Heard this morning from a friend in Auckland, New Zealand. It’s a small country and interconnected, so I’d been worrying about her and hers. Thankfully she and her family are all safe, but a close colleague of hers, a lady I may have met myself, was trapped in the CTV building, where rescue operations have now been suspended. On the plus side, by the wonders of Facebook I’ve just heard that another young friend is unscathed.

This should remind us all that no matter how great we may seem individually, none is greater than the planet to which we are all clinging, and which occasionally does its best to throw us off. It makes it all the sadder that the deaths of good people in Christchurch are reported along side the stories of the mad and bad Gaddafi, vowing to shed every last drop of other people’s blood to cling to power in Libya. A form of justice might be for him and his family, and all those like them, to be forcibly removed to Christchurch and made to help in the rescue operations, to show them that its better to be a fully paid up member of the human race than a parasitic growth upon it.