Photograph by Victor Ruiz Caballero, Reuters, posted on nationalgeographic.com.
By Magdalena I. García
In 1971, American singer, songwriter, and pianist Carole King released her first single, “I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky tumbling down...”, a beautiful song when one has a loved one in mind, but not when one wakes up abruptly, shaken out of bed by seismic activity.
One of the world’s most powerful earthquakes in a century—with a magnitude of 8.8—battered Chile before dawn today, immediately killing hundreds of people, knocking down buildings, and triggering tsunami warnings that threatened all Pacific coastlines. As the day advanced, we all were shaken a bit by the TV images coming from Santiago, Chile’s capital, and Concepción, another major city further south which was the closest to the epicenter of the quake. Buildings caught fire, bridges collapsed, debris blocked streets, cars overturned and lay scattered, overpasses fell, and telephone and power lines went down, all making communication and rescue efforts very challenging. By the end of the day, as the sun was setting in Chile, the nation’s president—Michelle Bachelet—estimated that two million people were affected by the earthquake.
With two major earthquakes so far this year—Haiti’s in January and now Chile’s—the reactions are likely to move quickly from commotion to condemnation. There will inevitably be chaos as survivors scramble to find adequate shelter and basic supplies. And this in turn will lead to criticism of the government’s response and the adequacy of international aid. And then, as if that were not enough, we will have to deal with the voices that will attempt to label the catastrophe as some sort of divine reprimand, blaming the victims for their suffering.
Why do earthquakes happen? I’m no scientist, but in the age of television and computer-generated graphics, even elementary school kids know that earthquakes are usually caused when rock underground suddenly breaks along a fault. And thanks to movie series like The Land Before Time, even pre-school children know all about plate tectonics: the motion of immense rigid plates at the surface of the Earth in response to flow of rock within the Earth. So how can religious fanatics and extremists dare attribute a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, to anyone’s—or a country’s—behavior and morality?
Carol King was right: although we might not feel it, the earth does indeed move under our feet. Now we just need to pray for the brain cells to move inside people’s heads, so they stop making inadequate and cruel judgments about other human beings and, worse yet, issuing them in God’s name. We also need to pray that the church might be an epicenter of new thinking and a new humanity, where blame is not an option because we all claim each other as brothers and sisters, and take full responsibility for planet care.
For incredible photos of the disaster, go to National Geographic:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/photogalleries/100227-chile-earthquake-2010-hawaii-tsunami-warning-pictures/#chile-earthquake-survivors-street_025964_600x450.jpg
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