The images of loss are heartbreaking to all. Those of us with children, as in any tragedy where innocent lives are lost, embrace our blood lines tighter. The visions of children in middle schools laying between slabs of concrete with desperate workers trying to pull them out, is more than the average person can stomach.

I see my children’s faces in these images. I see my face in the faces of these family members, entrenched in loss and confusion and pain.

We send our kids to school, pack their little lunch bags and wait for them to come back. Tragedy, that Mother Nature made, has destroyed life as we knew it, and will ever know it. “If I knew what would happen today, I would have kept my child home,” many are saying . “The tragedy would still happen,” others say, as if to console with their words. But the inconsolable silently think, as they scour ruins and call out familiar names, that their children would have been safe at home. Thoughts like these destroy us further.

As I read and reread the news reports and I see the figures rise, and know that entire families are lost forever, my mind cannot help but stray to a school paper that I wrote 2 days before the earthquake.

It was about China’s one child policy and how would a policy like this be met in the United States.

I learned about how the Government of China has controlled the population by 300 million in the last twenty years, with this policy.

It spoke of all the grants and plusses families got towards education and housing and many other perks that one would be denied if you didn’t sign and abide by this one child agreement.

I thought how sad that people felt they had to barter their fertility and a larger family for a grant, or chance at a better life for their one child. Hopefully, a boy child, because if he was male, he had a better chance of surviving infancy and then benefiting socially and financially from China’s policy. Boys get better health care than girls, so they would have a better chance of survival .I thought how sad to be aborted because you were a girl, or just because you were number two.

More people though have become more defiant of the policy in recent years, I must add.

While I am saturated in sadness like the rest of the Nation for the Chinese people, I wonder how many of them have lost their one child in this rubble .How many, boy or girl, man or woman could not be saved.

While no child is replaceable, and no matter how much care we take with our loved ones, tragedy still hits, I wonder who searched for their child and for one reason or the other, may never hold this child again, or hold another, thanks to Chinas policy.

As I end this post, I go upstairs and count my children 16yrs, 7yrs, 4yrs and 16 months and I give thanks.

Whether it’s one or four, they are each irreplaceable little pieces of us.

I count mine 1,2,3,4 and I shed a tear for those that can’t even count to one, any more.

Life has no comp days, what a tragic way to know this.

Tags: In the news