Yesterday,
I spent some time catching up with my friends in D.C., to see if they were OK.
The general report was that no one really knew what was going on at first,
perhaps even feared a kind of terrorist attack but that overall everyone was
OK, a few pictures shook off the walls, but everyone was OK. No one died as a
result of a 5.8 earthquake in the nation’s capital; everyone was OK. Let me say
that again, no one died. Seriously? A 5.8 earthquake. Everyone is OK? Are you
kidding me?... Hallelujah.
In
Farmer’s book, Evan Lyon writes a common saying of seismologists,
"Earthquakes don't kill people. Buildings kill people." Lyon
continues:
Earthquake illness is a disease
of social construction, its severity determined more by the capability of
buildings to withstand seismic activity than by the intensity of the tremor.
The capability to respond as emergency and health care workers depends, as
we’ve seen tragically in Haiti, almost entirely on how physical and human
infrastructure fare on shaking ground.
On February 27, 2010, a magnitude
8.8 earthquake, one of the most powerful recorded in human history, occurred
off the coast of Chile. It is dangerous to compare tragedies such as the
earthquakes that occurred in Chile and Haiti, but a number of differences are
striking. The earthquake in Chile was five hundred times more forceful than the
disaster in Haiti, yet best estimates suggest that nearly 300,000 people died
in Haiti while fewer than 600 died in Chile. Fewer buildings fell and fewer
people died.
It is our responsibility as human
beings and as those who care about the present and future of Haiti, not to
forget that manmade conditions allowed this unnatural disaster to take such a
devastating toll. These conditions took more than two hundred years to create;
they could be reversed in much less time. But unless our historic memory is
long enough and our analysis of the tragedy deep enough, efforts to
respond-however generous-will be insufficient. If suffering from earthquakes is
a disease of social determination, most meaningfully inflected by poverty, then
to prevent the next January 12 we must change the social context in which
people live.
I was struck with two thoughts in particular regarding infrastructure:
1) Americans live in an incredibly blessed place to have the kind of
infrastructure and delivery systems of care we have- as the political
season heats up as we soon enter an election year, do not forget that we
live in an incredibly blessed society and 2) to truly care for the peoples of
the world, Christians must engage
questions of infrastructure, government and policy-making; such matters matter terribly to the Missio Dei.
I suppose this is a third thought, but it struck me that in the past we as evangelicals
have been so quick to develop our own subcultures and only listen to
music, read books and watch movies produced by Christians (and often poorly
produced and written at that); yet, that I have never heard a Christian decrying the
godlessness of a building or a bridge made by a nonChristian. Why is that so?
Because the question at hand is never so much whether a Christian or a
nonChristian has formed and shaped the substance and integrity of that bridge or building, rather whether it was in fact done well. I think Christians ought to pay attention to
such worldview-related questions as perhaps the greatest question before the Church today is, “do we seek to live well in ALL of life?”
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