The Earthquake that changed everything...and nothing
January 12, 4:54 PM, 7.1 magnitude earthquake…..the earth shook and our core trembled….. debris, people dead, desperation, stuck under rubble……the sky turned gray within minutes, thick with dust coming from fallen building…..desperation over whereabouts of family members, friends….the anxiety following the quake for some was much worse than the quake itself. Mortifying, devastating, painful wonders, devastating truth, denial, resentment, unity….. As the streets of Port-au-Prince rivaled scenes from apocalyptic movies, fellow Haitians united in sorrow and in hope because witnessing such an abrupt end to lives and habits that comforted us in their normalcy tends to have that effect on people. Some things are considered pointless while others are ranked higher….return to a simpler, kinder way of life…..
And life continues, and blackouts are less frequent; telephone services are restored, business open their doors, people hesitantly try to regain even a hint of social life….Port-au-Prince tries to poke a hole through the rubble of desperation and fear….and the blackouts are less frequent; telephone services start giving more options, businesses offer more products, people immerse themselves in their activities….Port-au-Prince is picking up the pieces and building itself up to a new city….under rubble….
Because, in retrospect, not much has changed. We can kid ourselves into thinking that we have become better but we have stayed the same. And in our case, it only makes it worse. Telephone services are restored and prices are incredibly high, people immerse themselves in a decadent and perverse way of life, made more acceptable under tents and tarpaulins. People see misery….and shut their eyes.
Unity, union….gone! I wonder if they ever even existed. While we all embraced our neighbor, helped them out on Jan 12, it was not long until we became just as cold, uncaring and prejudiced as we were before that day. Oh the delightful effects of a catastrophe….how unfortunate that such a disaster is the only catalyst to goodness and good deeds…. The kindness of strangers, of neighbors to whom you’ve never even given the honor of a “good morning”….where is it now? We must have been high on that Tuesday…jan 12…..or I guess expecting at any minute the violence of a tsunami or the descent of a shiny chariot from the sky with God in it will tend to have that effect on people…..the urgency to do good, while you still had the chance….was it propelled by the fear of being on the bad pile (when God separates those of who have been good and those who have been bad into two piles) or by the want of being good for goodness sake? Whether one case or the other, it is now gone….gone as the after-shocks occur less and less…..the fear of another one gradually being one, we resettle into our homes……they’ are marked with yellow and red people……yellow = should be repaired….red = should be torn down…. They don’t mean “if it’s standing I can stay in it, whether it’s marked yellow or red!”…..but more often than not, it’s not imprudence……just cause of a fact…. Fact: I don’t have any where else to go……Cause: I will then stay in a house marked yellow or red.
Unity, union, goodness of heart and act….gone. Of all the images stuck in my head from that day Jan 12 and the day after was the memory of man, in a pickup truck, randomly picking up pedestrians to give them a ride…..without needing a remuneration….families living in a same house……eating together….brought together by a catastrophe and the gratefulness that none of them had perished….it was not long before the little quirks, tendencies, things that we call “defects” start to get on our nerves…..”Must she talk like that?” “Why does he act like that?”…” What an hypocrite!” “What an asshole!” …..and so union and unity, goodness of heart and act disappear as our old “selves” reappear….. to justify our behavior, we say that closeness and proximity destroy relationships….. and the good deeds are forgotten and people are hated over the same stupid things that we vowed to forget and forgive on that faithful day…Jan 12….oh the delightful effects of a disaster…. “I understand the why of this behavior even if it irritates me and I will overlook it and I won’t pay it no mind.” …is replaced by…. “If you even try to come to my face with that shitty behavior and expect me to buckle, I will put my foot so far up your ass…..” The hell with unity, union….bitterness and division is much more easy and the effects …oh the effects are much more dangerous and lasting than a 7.1 quake….. I guess one way to look at it is to say that we can overcome a earthquake since we can cause things with a much more destructive consequence only with the power of our speech and actions…..
And we go on in life…living as we once did not realizing that there are consequences to our actions or worse…knowing that there are consequences but simply…just…not…give…a…fuck….in the tradition of Chris Rock when he said of Bush “If you were hanging over a cliff and the only that thing that could save you was a fuck and Bush had a pocket full of fucks….he wouldn’t give it to you!”…..this is a joke….our situation is real…..because all we needed….all we need to survive, to live, is for our people to give a fuck….and they have pockets full of fucks….but just won’t give one….and we become even more careless with our lives, with our health because “Microbe pa tuye Haitien!”…..yeah we live by the premise that something so small as a bacteria could not have the power to kill us, for we have a mighty sun that kills them before they could even affect us….but wait a minute…..October, November, mysterious death….diarrhea, vomiting and after maximum 4 hours, death….cause….vibrio cholerae….in other words….cholera….yeah I guess bacteria ARE starting to kill us…..brought to us by the foreigners who have come here to assist us….we blame them, and they are to blame since it has been proven that it came from them….but are they to blame for the fact that we drink water directly from rivers and river beds……..are they to blame that while we are drinking this water, we are also washing our clothes, our dishes in those rivers and river beds……are they to blame for the fact that we also SHIT in those same rivers and river beds……WAKE UP!!! Had our habits been better, safer, healthier, CLEANER the number of deaths by cholera would not have been so grand….consequences….
And now we move towards chosing a leader.....still overwhelmed with the myth of "the messiah president", we hope that whoever takes office and is elected to sit on that famous "fauteuil presidentiel" will deliver us from all the decadence in which we strive....what a joke.....the popular musician accustomed to going on uncensored diatribes,crossdressing, pulling his pants down at performances against the former first lady who was once elected to the senate but renounced because her husband, who was running for president, was not elected....it has all come down to the lesser of 2 evils....who will be "less" bad.....or just like one acuqaintance so dearly put it : "Dog shit VS Cat shit!".....what...a....joke....
After Jan 12, I used to say that we have reached the bottom as a people and that there were no other way to go but up….I now see that I might have been wrong. We have reached the bottom of bottoms and there is a way to go up……but we don’t seem to really see the importance of doing so…and so we build our lives, our properties, our hopes and dreams, our future, in this bottom of bottoms and delude ourselves into thinking that we are improving…….an underground city, exemplary in its filth, corruption, deception, misery…..we don’t even aspire to going up….rise up…….more like rise downward……towards the abyss…..and when things get tough and overwhelming, we let our frustration out with a sigh and we say : “ 12 Janvier....January 12…..7.1…..4:54PM”….the earthquake and its related its colloquialisms have become part of us as we express disgust, beauty or ugliness, state of mind with, fissures, rubbles etc…” You look ugly” = “Your face is all fissured” or “You look like you’ve just been pulled out from under rubble”. “I’m sad” = “ My heart is fissured”…..well I guess I am fissured that in the grand scheme of this earthquake, when it was time to chose the red pill or the blue pill….the improvement pill or the decadence pill, we chose the decadence one…..the building under rubble one…..so much for learning something…….
