Emotional Overload.

It started in December of last year when we all watched the horror of the killer Tsunami in Southeast Asia. We emptied our pockets to help the victims and our hearts ached for the survivors who lived on after everything and everyone they had was washed away.

Then the rains came to sunny Southern California and the hillsides moved. We watched the onslaught of mud and debris, closer to home this time, and again our hearts ached for the victims.

Only a few months later, Katrina and then Rita killed hundreds of our fellow citizens, left hundreds of thousands homeless, and devastated a beautiful and unique city. Once more, we reached deeper into our pockets and our hearts, finding more money and more love to reach out to those who had lost what little they had.

Still reeling from the financial and emotional fatigue of the killer hurricanes, we watched with numb eyes and senses as an earthquake destroyed much of the idyllic Kashmiri landscape and mud buried whole villages in Central America.

Are we in danger of emotional overload? How much more horror, how many more tragedies, can we handle? We need to step back and allow our feelings to regroup and renew themselves.

Ask any mother with a large family if she loves her new baby less than the ones who went before. Despite the worries of siblings that their importance will fade with the advent of more children, any mother will quickly explain that her love extends to all her children, her capacity for love simply expanding and deepening with each new birth.

That is the glory of the human race. Our empathetic concern for our fellow men may undergo a temporary paralysis but quickly bounces back, our capacity to care and help deepened by our experiences. For all our wars and killings, for all the torturing and maiming of our brothers, we are, at our best, a species who yearns for peace and a loving relationship with the fellow travelers on our unstable and ravaged spaceship earth.

If we can only find a way to divert our resources from armaments and petty political battles toward nourishing and empowering the citizens of the world, then we will finally live up to the evolutionary expectations demanded of a species not only blessed with the greatest minds nature has ever developed, but with the hearts to match.