Skip to main content

Haiti From Here

Until a few days ago, there were about nine million people in Haiti.  Then the earth heaved the whole nation, as if it were a rag in the mouth of a dog until buildings collapsed everywhere.  Now it appears that possibly 200,000 people died when almost everything fell down.  That is to say, two of every hundred people died almost instantly, and most of the rest of them have no place to stay.

There are about two-and-a-half million people in the Twin Cities Metropolitan area.  Had the earth shook here as it did in Haiti, with similar consequences, there would be 55,000 bodies in the streets, and most of us would be homeless. 

But Haiti's disaster was a national disaster.  Had the heaving of the earth done to our nation what it did to Haiti, we would have 6,500,000 people dead, with no where to go. 

Mostly Saudi terrorists brought down the Twin Tower in New York City, killing about 3000. people.  To match the scale of what has happened in Haiti, we would have to imagine that thousands of buildings fell, and that nearly half a million people died, almost instantly, and that the city would be in ruins. 

Do you think, still, Rush Limbaugh, that we should do nothing?  Do you really believe, Rush Limbaugh, that when Barack Obama asks us to send $10. to help Haiti, that he is going to keep the money, or use the names to ask for political donations?  You pathetic, miserable excuse for a human being!

What does Sarah Palin have to say about Haiti?  She has a lot to say about everything else.

Was it AIG that magnanimously gave one million dollars to aid Haiti?  What did they give their CEO?

Five people have been killed in Minneapolis recently.  Is the fabric of our society shredding, or are there enormous disasters in our national neighborhood?

It is 2:30 AM.  It is dark outside.  I am trying to get a perspective. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

Rose-Colored Glasses and Job Training

About the time God was creating dirt, I enrolled in a church college, and commuted to school, where the President--a man of no uncertain opinions--often spoke in daily chapel, molding our young minds as the Creator himself had once molded Adam from clay.  There was too much organic matter in the dirt that I was, so I failed creative pottery.   The chapel was new during those years, and we heard often about the rose window at the east end, behind us, up in the balcony where dutiful student monitors noted which assigned seats were empty, and reported us to somebody.  Nobody reported which assigned seats were occupied.  It was the sinners who were important.   The College alumni magazine recently reported that the rose window has been refurbished; hauled off to California, and back again, to reclaim its glory.  The article did not note that I  had gone to California, too, years earlier, without achieving glory.  Nowhere in the article does it s...