Haiti was hit by a 7.0 earthquake that flattened up to 80% of the buildings in some areas, collapsed the Presidential Palace, made the seaport unusable, and paralyzed the country. The death toll is 100,000 people, and the estimates are that the final tally could be as high as half a million dead. The are in the slow, tedious, and grueling task of locating people still trapped in the rubble and extricating them, when there is no fuel for machinery, no communication, and no medical services once people are rescued.
The good news is that the internet has allowed donations to happen quicker. Organizations no longer have to wait for pledges and checks; donations are instantaneous. SHARE, the Secular Humanist Aid and Relief Efforts, raised $47,000 in less than 24 hours. Despite our own troubled economy, the US has pledged hundreds of millions in aid, and have begun shipping in food, water, and shelter, with the military to keep order and ensure distribution.
The bad news is that some are seeing this strictly as a way to gain leverage. Pat Robertson claimed that Haitians had made a pact with the devil to overthrow the French, and the earthquake happened 200 years later when god realized it. How does Pat know this? Was he there?
Rush Limbaugh fretted that "this (the earthquake) will play right into Obama's hands" by allowing him to show generosity and compassion to people in need. It seems that not even earthquakes are immune from party politics. Rather than reach out and urge their listeners to help their fellow man, both used the incident to divide and attack. Is it any wonder that both religion and Republicans are in decline?
The link is that both seemed to think there was a purpose to the earthquake, that god would use it to punish innocent people (violating the covenant that the sins of the father wouldn't be visited upon the son, by the way). If god wanted to help Obama, wasn't getting him elected enough? Did he really have to destroy an island that isn't even under our jurisdiction? Couldn't he have just drowned another city, like New Orleans?
Wouldn't it have been better all around if god had simply changed the minds of these two petty troglodytes?
Have you no sense of decency, sirs?
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