The city is in ruins, but the people are ruined

As the newspapers all print cover stories detailing dark, ominous rescue missions - some productive, others futile - and photos depict streets strewn with bodies, buildings collapsed, and sobbing mothers, it is indeed hard to focus on much else. The world around seems blurry, surreal, as millions suffer a great and tragic catastrophe.

Their world was already a bleak one; the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, a government known widely to be as corrupt as a king, and a land frequently blasted by hurricanes and tropical storms. Looking from that perspective, one might have thought that things couldn't get much worse. But they did, they damn well got worse by leaps and bounds. Theirs is a trouble that will last; it will last beyond the last dying gasp of a person trapped in rubble; beyond the panic of the looters and rabble rousers in the streets; it will last beyond the stench of decay that correspondents report to fill the air across the city. The U.S. will put our military in place and rebuild the ports, the streets, the homes and the capital building, but trouble will still hang acrid in the air.

How much aid will it take to replace the lives lost? Can a price be put to such a thing? The people, those left breathing anyway, have lost big, and a city rebuilt, even a government and infrastructure system repaired to a level beyond its previous dysfunction and all the food they can eat will not erase the memory of this disaster. Their friends, neighbors and family who were lost in the quake will not come back, but their cries for help shall not cease. No, those left behind shall be forced to endure with a kind heaviness over them; a feeling that they got lucky and now the cost is to remember. They will hear the screams long into each night before they sleep, and when they do find sleep, the sights of faces and bodies will trouble their dreams; they will smell the foulness of the air even in the midst of a field of tulips. Each reporter writing from Port Au Prince talks about the screams and cries of those who are still trapped but cannot be found, or quotes someone else who has heard the same. This will not stop for those in Haiti, for the people left behind.

No human should ever be forced to go through a thing like that. There is no wrong that requires such suffering. Pat Robertson seems to think a "pact with the devil" has caused the devastation, but even the most spiteful person I know would never buy into such madness. Pacts with the devil? Are you daft man? Mr. Robertson should hop a first-class flight to Haiti and lend a hand in the streets, maybe collecting bodies or some other painful task; he should really get his hands dirty and see, just see first-hand how it feels to be those people. To truly suffer the inhumane.

Research and such...

This week was the beginning of the new quarter and thus, the beginning of my honors research project. I immediately found myself in quite deep with the seemingly "light" load I took this quarter. The project for honors is one of two mostly independent research projects I'll be doing this quarter, along with American Foreign Policy and my job at the paper. Not that I'm afraid of a little work, but it could get messy.

A meeting this week gave me a clear direction for my project and I have undertaken the beginnings of my research. I picked up three books and a half dozen or so journal articles to get things moving. I also seem to have picked up a cold from somewhere and I sure hope I can battle through it because there is no time for laying up sick.