Here is an interesting read:
What does the world owe Haiti? Beyond the moral imperative to help save the country there is a practical incentive. Natural disasters - earthquakes, storms, floods - are unavoidable acts of God. But it's possible to build societies, from New Orleans to Port-au-Prince, that can weather them. Doing so would save lives and the tens of billions of dollars that are spent every time a fragile community gets wiped out. "The world can't afford more of these disasters," says Roger Bilham, a seismologist at the University of Colorado. "It's worth investing in these problems now, while we can." Haiti's buried were victims of poverty and neglect, not just the quake. But we owe it to the survivors - to people like Michaud Jonas - to help build a Haiti that will never again be so vulnerable.Extract taken from 'Aftershock'TIME Magazine, Feb 1 2010 Issue
What really is the difference between a moral imperative and a practical incentive? To most, solace from a guilty conscience sounds like necessary relief. Then again, why might there even be guilt in the first place?
What might be an 'avoidable' act of God?
What becomes of the 'tens of billions of dollars' that are saved when Port-au-Prince capably resists the next tremor with sound infrastructure in what seems to be a seismogram of the future?
"Surely the world can't afford more of these disasters," unless it plays litigant to an economy of judgment spurred by a currency of wrath. Does it?
What is the real message that is meant to be transmitted by all of this? Is there even one?
The quake queries, and swallows her throat for the first time in a few decades. Difficult, perhaps painful, but interesting indeed.
