Cliché, and yet
When a disaster hits like yesterday’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, I feel weird blogging about it. It’s cliché. It’s bourgeois for me to sit here in a quiet living room with heat and electricity and cupboards full of food, typing away on a luxury computer about a devastating situation that has nothing to do with me directly and vice versa.
But I do feel the need to add one more voice to the internet-sphere in this regard: Pat Robertson is a giant douche. Way to immediately blame this level of devastation on “a pact to the devil” that was supposedly made 200 years ago. (I guess he would know.)
Whether or not I have the “right” to talk about it, the idea of 100,000 people dead in one earthquake terrifies me. A dormant fault line especially strikes a nerve because I live on a fault line here in Utah. Will I still be alive, will I still live here, will I be in town, will I be asleep, will I be naked when a quake does eventually strike my neighborhood? Will I die, or will I stand helplessly by as others die? Will I be a traumatized victim or survive without a scratch? Will I be cowardly or altruistic? This is the stuff of nightmares.
I empathize with the people affected by this earthquake and by previous disasters (both natural and man-made). I also feel guilty because I am relieved. For me, right now, right here, everything seems normal. I feel like turning off the ubiquitous media coverage and doing something else. I’m a little thirsty, so maybe I’ll go grab a cold glass of fresh water. I’m a little tired, so maybe I’ll go curl up in my comfortable bed. I’m a little existential right now, so maybe I’ll be thankful that, at least for now, my life has not been turned upside down.
