Aftershocks

I haven't felt like this since September 13, 2001.

Before you give me any credit at all for being sensitive, I don't recall having this reaction to the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, the last catastrophe that really rivals the Haitian earthquake. That was at a time in my life when I was dividing my time between working too much and drinking way too much, so I guess the news didn't sink in as deep.

But I remember on September 12, 2001, my birthday, realizing I was depressed and then realizing I'd never been depressed on a birthday before. And then, too, realizing I wasn't depressed about the birthday, I was depressed about reality sinking in that the New York skyline had been suddenly and horribly Photoshopped back to 1965 and a few thousand people had been executed for showing up to work on time or making it to the airport.

Devastation like what just happened in Haiti shames the imagination of Cormac McCarthy. The scope of it, the suffering, makes me alternate between hoping there's a God to help these people and pointing an accusatory finger at God for making such a dangerous and unpredictable world.

I hear news stories about the lack of construction standards in Haiti as if these people should have seen this coming. But what natural disasters are Haitians used to? Hurricanes. Get them sometimes more than once a week. Un-reinforced concrete is probably the cheapest way to build a house that will survive four hurricanes in three weeks in a country that seems to exist to enrich despotic dictators and prove that there's always someplace worse everyone else on earth could be.

One NPR story talked specifically about how all this was built 'right on a fault.' Hello, the New Madrid fault runs practically by my house, and I doubt my home is built to survive a 7.0 earthquake. Haiti sits on a fault that hasn't done doodly squat since Mason & Dixon were drawing their meaningless line through Maryland and Pennsylvania. You expect locals who've mainly had to find a way to get enough calories to not starve to death in spite of leaders like Baby Doc Duvalier to build to Los Angeles code?