An editorial at the National Post makes a strong case for Canada to do everything in its power to help the survivors of the Haiti earthquake:
Nature has many ways to kill us. But none are as sudden and catastrophic as a major earthquake. They demolish not only buildings, but something very basic within the human psyche.
The Greeks believed earthquakes were the result of a vengeful Poseidon smashing the earth with his trident. The book of Revelations is full of seismic upheaval: “I saw when he opened the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake. The sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became as blood.” In the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, religious Indonesians thought they’d been punished for straying from the path of true Islam. Pat Robertson became an instant figure of Internet ridicule on Wednesday when he suggested that the earthquake in Haiti resulted from a Napoleonic-era “pact to the devil.” But he is hardly alone: Throughout human history, in all parts of the world, the devastation wrought by earthquakes has been so enormous as to be inexplicable as anything but a manifestation of divine wrath. In the wake of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, no less a thinker than Voltaire questioned his faith in a benevolent entity, posing theological questions that persist to this day: What kind of God destroys schools alongside prisons, mansions alongside hovels, the good alongside the wicked?
In the case of Haiti, epicenter to what will likely become the most deadly earthquake in the history of the Americas, that question is particularly apt. Even before the earth moved, the country was the impoverished, chaotic hellhole of the Western hemisphere. To send another horseman galloping into its capital seems a species of sick, cosmic joke. All great tragedies test humanity’s faith in a higher power. But some, like this modern day reprise of Lisbon, more than others.
