I found this article really intersting, and Im going to post it here because it sums up the last year very well on a world scale.

Year tainted by death's long shadow
By Kate Legge
January 1, 2005

THE public scrapbook for 2004 with its royal wedding, Olympic gladiators and election victories in the shadow of war came spectacularly unstuck on Boxing Day when the tsunamis in Asia penetrated the post-Christmas haze.

Up until then the year had unfurled more or less as we expected. There was violence nightly in our living rooms. Bombs killed hundreds on Spanish trains. There was an explosion outside Australia's Jakarta embassy. Bloodshed in the Middle East. The brutal slaughter of children in a Beslan school. Gangland slayings in Melbourne streets.

But there were fairytales to brighten the grey. We toasted a Danish prince and his beautiful Tasmanian sweetheart. There was the crowning of Australian Idol star Casey Donovan, and scientists unravelling the mystery of Alzheimer's disease. Heart-lifting, life-affirming moments.

The high and mighty fell in numbers. A NSW judge broken over a missing vial of alcohol-tainted blood. Melbourne businessman John Elliott bankrupt. A Brisbane public servant haunted by controversy's glare jumped in front of a train. And Yassar Arafat was laid to rest.

We bade farewell to a chorus line of Australians. Film-maker Tim Burstall. Athlete Shirley Strickland, who died alone curled up under her kitchen bench. Former Democrats leader Janine Haines. Former Victorian premier Rupert Hamer. Jim Bacon, who succumbed quickly to lung cancer's death sentence.

From the hall of fame to the house of horrors, we glimpsed the spectre of child pornography, secret libraries of sexually explicit photographs. Asbestosis victims in oxygen masks hunting down James Hardie.

Hurrah for hornbags Kath and Kim. Oscars galore for Lord of the Rings. We won bags of gold in the pool, but lost face when our women came to blows following their rowing defeat.

The rise of green shopping bags at supermarket checkouts inspired hope in grassroots action. Water rationing awoke the nation to the scarcity of a resource we took for granted. Nature and the earth's fragility pricked at us constantly with stories of extreme weather.

But the tsunamis will dominate history's memoir.

This century, still young, began with planes crashing into skyscrapers. Now walls of water have slammed into tens of thousands of people on either side of an ocean. No one had planned on the earth shifting from under us.

Images of the sea's massive flows will play again and again before our eyes, like the planes on Manhattan's skyline.

Those innocents lost to dust had names. The bloated bodies on Asia's shores are anonymous. Too many dead, too far from capitalism's epicentre. There is no one to claim responsibility for what has happened. No grainy video of a devil in a white headscarf and fatigues. Nothing but the blinding power of nature to rob us of retort.

US bodybags from Iraq are a hillock beside the Kilimanjaro-sized mountain of corpses in areas that few could locate on a map. "Who needs terrorism?" said the anguished parent of a son safe on Thailand's east coast.

Those who survived the waves now steel themselves for the spread of disease as they pluck flotsam from the rubble. People who had nothing lost everything: children, parents, brothers, friends, the sanctuary of shelter.

This will test our global village. There will be reconstruction. Better warning systems. The potential for warring factions to pull together in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. A different kind of coalition of the willing - a coalition of the helping - with no quarrel about motive or malice.

In Australia, fat and happy, and blessed by a healthy democracy, we should be in the mood for giving. With a strong economy and unprecedented share market gains, our nation is becalmed on prosperity with the ripples of an occasional property lull. Our pockets run deep.

Whatever public milestones mark the carriageways of 2004 we will remember the year by the humdrum comings and goings of domestic diaries and personal reference points. Private celebrations and family crises from small to all-consuming will differentiate these 12 months past.

Our New Year resolutions will reflect a myriad of individual dreams and aspirations, but we stand humbled by the randomness of a new world order where the threat of terrorism and tsunamis bind citizens together in a quiet prayer of thanks ... that there, but for the grace of God, go we.

The Australian

Article can be found on News.com.au

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