And there really isn't. We can send money, to Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders; that's about it. And in truth, these organizations are well-fixed for the kind of emergency work that's needed around the Indian Ocean rim right now. They'll provide medicine and food, clean water, building materials; they'll help bury or burn the 120,000 dead. There's not much we who are not on the ground over there can do in the crisis, and if you have an urge to go over and help, unless you're a professional -- a doctor, a water-purification expert -- you're being asked to stay home. The one thing we could do, the one useful long-term thing, would be to try to take a lesson that a lot of the things we consider problems aren't, and that most of us have never seen a real "disaster." And that after this emergency phase fades, Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders will still need money to carry out their work all over the world, for the undramatic, quotidian, chronically desperate.