Natural Disasters

Tuesday afternoon, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked the small island nation of Haiti and its nine-million inhabitants. The quake flattened the president's palace, the cathedral, hospitals, schools, the main prison and whole neighborhoods. Officials feared thousands – perhaps more than 100,000 – may have perished but there was no firm count. One leading Haitian senator commented that there could be as many as 500,000 dead.

As my wife and I walked into the local cinema, before us stood one of the largest movie advertisement displays I've ever seen.  It depicted a coastal city being completely ripped apart by unprecedented seismic activity—tossing vast swaths of the city into the sky and dumping entire neighborhoods into a hungry ocean.  It was a scene of utter devastation that clearly would have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.  And it was a fitting advertisement for the movie 2012, the new End-Of-The-World epic written and directed by Roland Emmerich, coming out this November.

Our local newspaper last week reprinted a Groundhog Day cartoon by Mike Luckovich from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  It depicted two gentlemen in old-fashioned garb staring forlornly at Punxsutawney Phil who has keeled over (having fainted or died). One gent says to the other, "He saw his 401K." We might display a guarded smile after reading this sign of our economic times. But what can this hibernating marmot tell us about our future – seriously?

Would you build your own house in a flood zone on ground below sea level? Most would not do this and if they did, they would lack common sense. How about a city? Does it make sense to build and perpetuate a metropolitan area on land below sea level? The question might be—can it be done? Obviously, under optimum conditions it may be done and maintained if massive funding is available. Even then, there is no guarantee that natural forces will not overwhelm man-made systems.

The sound of the cicadas was deafening as I walked along on a summer Sabbath morning, enjoying the breeze and collecting my thoughts after a busy and eventful week. I had so much to think about, and was trying to making sense of it from a biblical point of view. Yet, those cicadas were humming away so loudly, it was hard to concentrate.