Haiti: Reflections on catastrophe.

[I wrote a draft of this in the early days following the Haiti quake and decided not to post it fearing its perceived insensitivity. I reread it recently and thought it contained some worthwhile thoughts so I'm posting it after having made some edits, etc.]

---

Sudden mass casualties have a unique way of sending the human community spiraling into a frenzied revaluation of all our worldy beliefs.

As believers in God, we're forced to confront the logical conniption of such large-scale suffering occurring under the supposedly benevolent and omnipresent gaze of an all-powerful creator. Those whose God is of the retributive persuasion, may incline towards identifying reasons why one community and not another may have deserved such a devastating expression of wrath. Those without a belief in God—particularly when enduring suffering—may find themselves feeling (more than ever) the absence of such a powerful healing agent, looking for something, anything to pin their hopes to. People in all categories are likely to experience a heightened sense of cause, as it is all too human to ask, Why?

Our very membership to the human family connotes an obsession with causes. We've built our science around them, our very lives and ascension as a species seems to have everything to do with our ability to recognize and route out causes. Anything we might define as "progress" depends on the discovery of new causes, or on back-linking old causes to still older causes which are then, in turn, effects as well as causes; the result (to our mind's eye) is a chain of events receding back in time and disappearing into the abyss of pre-history.

It's with this long chain of history in mind (and with the utmost caution and sensitivity) that I contemplate the significance of an event such as this most recent natural disaster in Haiti [and also the still more recent Chilean earthquake].

Here's a question: How is the ordinary suffering that we as a species experience everyday any different from the calamitous suffering caused by a natural disaster?

Granted, one is a far less concentrated form of suffering. But is there something fundamentally different about it? Some lesser significance? If one thinks about the innumerable ways in which humans suffer every day—in hospitals, in poverty and starvation, in illness, in accidents and sudden tragedy, at the hands of one another—and then considers the fact that death (likely accompanied by some degree of suffering) is something, the fate of which, no single human being has ever escaped; why then should space/time-based notions like concentration or frequency or proximity imbue an event with any added significance? Is life not intrinsically hostile?

Imagine for a moment, each of every life regretfully cut short by the Haiti quake tenderly spread out over time, shuffled in among the mean, "ordinary" suffering we accept as normal—would that not dilute our sense of loss?

Proximity is everything.

The lives lost in Haiti and Chile bespeak an unfathomable sum of grief and anguish. This is felt by the human community at large, but is no doubt experienced most acutely by the family and friends of the victims. The severance of these vital human connections—alive through shared experience, love and kinship, but cut short without explanation or higher cause—offends our very humanness, rattles our concocted sense of justice, and results in immeasurable sorrow and frustration.

And yet, the further you get from an event of this sort, the more the forcefield of sensitivity wains. Given enough time, of course, nothing is sacred. One day you wake up and it's somehow acceptable to make jokes of a certain kind. Holocaust jokes (one would be hard-pressed to come up with a more oxymoronic two-word phrase) are, indeed, taboo. But that doesn't keep many variety from circulating. Such jokes have the potential to elicit a wide range of reactions; even in the most receptive of telling environments it would still likely be acknowledged as being "off-color." But off-color? Surely in the direct wake of 1945, any "taking lightly" of the events that had just transpired warranted a visceral, barbaric reaction.

Proximity is everything.

I don't intend on making any jokes. My only aim here is to give a broad-lensed perspective of our human predicament: mainly, that death and disorder and calamity are as much a part of life as their antonyms; and that history (what's known of it) is the record of these elements playing out, for better and for worse, and with impartiality.

For info on the relief efforts in Haiti and Chile, and for an easy way to donate visit: http://www.redcross.org/.