Chile: Perspective

"To the world, you may be just another girl

"But to me, baby, you are the world"

--Brad Paisley, "The World"

"We are the world

We are the children

We are the ones who make a brighter day so let's start giving"

--Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, "We Are the World"

"I believe in the power that comes

from a world brought together as one..."

Alan Frew, "I Believe" (Vancouver 2010 Olympic theme)

I saw it scrolling across the CNN ticker and actually recoiled. "The strongest aftershock so far measured 6.9".

Story here, in case you've been incommunicado all day.

8.8. Wikipedia rates it the seventh-most severe quake ever recorded. It occurred in the same subduction zone that spawned the strongest temblor in history, the 1960 Valdivia quake that measured 9.5. A tsunami from that quake went around the world, covering 10,000 km in hours and devastating places as far-flung as Hilo, Hawaii and the coast of Japan. Both those places were on high alert today: thousands have been evacuated. As of this writing, Hawaii's in the clear. Japan, not known. Tsunamis are impossible to predict.

I was talking to my mother this evening and she mentioned something along the lines of there being an awful lot of high-profile natural disasters in the last few years.

It really does seem so, doesn't it? Those of a theological bent might go so far as to suggest End Times right around yonder corner, and they might find a more receptive audience than usual of late. That's to say nothing of the various man-made disasters just starting to make themselves known...Peak Oil being just one, the worldwide economic crisis being another (and rest assured, that one ain't over yet, not by a long chalk).

Myself, I don't believe in End Times, or at least not the Revelation version of same. I've seen far too many 'The end is nigh!' predictions come to naught. And while Matthew states that "no one shall know the day, nor the hour", it's worth noting that most of the newly-minted Christians living in 100 C.E expected the Rapture at any moment. Even if I believed in a judging God--and I don't--I'd have to conclude He's taking His sweet time.

I'm put in mind of the Great Flood, called Noah's Flood only by those who have never heard of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Both sources state that the flood was a global event, and to this day many Christians believe that at some point in human history, the world was submerged.

It wasn't. But it might as well have been. When you live on a plain, as the Sumerians did, and when your area of reference encompasses a tiny fraction of the earth's surface (all damn near perfectly flat), it doesn't take much water to literally end your world.

Likewise, to a great many people in and around Santiago Chile, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and vast swathes of Indonesia, and Sichuan province in China, the world already ended. Survivors the planet over walk around with the same thousand-yard stare, nominally alive but sometimes it's kind of hard to tell. Watching the world end will do that to a person. Some never recover. It's amazing, really, that others do, or can.

We humans have an intuitive grasp of this notion, that while our world hasn't ended, for others afflicted by whatever disaster, it might as well have. I think we recognize, perhaps on a cellular level, that we're all connected and that our place is a lot more tenuous than our rational minds would suggest. We have done, and continue to do, great things for Haiti. Now it's also Chile's turn.

I think it's critical to understand that this is what money is for. It's not for sitting in bank vaults or enriching the pockets of Wall Street banksters. It's for making life a little more worth living. For you and I, certainly...but mostly for those whose world has ended.

They call earthquakes "acts of God". Perhaps the real "acts of God" are up to us, now. I rather think they are.