Here is this week’s missive from writer, designer and social activist Scott Turner, who runs the Thursday night Pub Quiz at Rocky Sullivan’s in Red Hook.
…tonight, fires scorch the skies above Port-au-Prince.
It’s 2:30 a.m. New York time. In Haiti tonight, devastation in the capital city. While we have every reason to recoil from American media’s overwrought hype, there’s no way the crisply-coiffed newsreaders are exaggerating: Port-au-Price is a city in ruins. It was before Tuesday’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake. Now, with a push from the occasionally cruel Mother Earth, Port-au-Prince is a place too cruel for even Dante’s circles.
What does a city do when the ground roars beneath it, the mountains shudder above it, and there’s no one to put out the fires?
We’ll find out. But it won’t be good.
There are some moments that test our belief that life can be good. Haiti, the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere, wracked with civil and political conflict, lacking infrastructure most of us in Brooklyn take for granted — hit with its most powerful earthquake ever.
It’s not fair. Life hasn’t been fair in Haiti in anyone’s memory. Miracles don’t really happen, but if they did, they’s fly right over Haiti, their golden contrails barely visible in the sad blue skies over Cite Soleil.
This will be the only news for the next few days.
Check in with Brooklyn’s Radio Soleil Haiti for the latest. Global antennas are putting out the word tonight: “there is little left of Port-au-Prince…fires are out of control…tremor after tremor…people are in the streets…help us, please, help us.”
If you can’t stand big relief efforts — requests for donations, canned goods, blankets; benefit concerts an news reports with mawkish piano music — this might be the time to turn away from the screen.
But of course, we can’t turn away. For reasons right and wrong, we respond. This is one of those times. Wednesday’s first light will bring pictures of cataclysm and numbers beyond belief. Some of us won’t turn away because a good wreck is always worth scoping. The rest of us will wonder “what can I do?” To comprehend, to help, to get our balance back. When a poor city’s people are buried ‘neath the poor city’s shanties, the earthquake shakes us all.
Brooklyn will respond. Not for anything in our past. Not because politicians and clergy and verbose quizmasters ask us to. Simply, we’ll ask how we can help. Our hearts are metaphysical receptacles where we decide whose hand to take and which horror to look in the eye. In times like this, they tell us to ignore all the voices except our soul’s.