Hell on Earth. This phrase brings with it so many images. Fire. Destruction. Death. Hollywood has provided scenes for us in countless movies, but I do not picture some contrived moment of special effects. Real life provides enough images, more horrifying in their reality than any screenwriter or director can produce. After viewing Los Angeles Times reporter Carolyn Cole’s moving piece of photojournalism entitled, “So Many People Who Need Help”, I have seen “hell on Earth.” So many people in our privileged country need to see these images to remind ourselves of our incredible good fortune and the multitude of less fortunate people in this big world that need our help.
Cole’s audio slide show documents the days after the tragic 7.0 earthquake that hit the small Caribbean island of Haiti on January 24, 2010. Amid the pictures of buildings crumbling to dust and UN officials doling out much needed aid, I am struck by the faces of the victims. Their eyes hold such agony, yet I could see such resiliency of the human spirit as well. Incredibly human images of a man carrying his sleeping child and families huddled together around the light of a single candle remind me that these are people, not so different from myself, and their world has been turned upside down. The final shot of the police officer, struck down by another officer who mistook him for a looter, is telling of the experience itself. The streets must have been chaos. I can imagine that authorities desperately tried to do something, anything, to bring order to the pandemonium, but the screams and the panic and the death just continued on. Hell on Earth.
Worse than these pictures were those that I found as I searched through the attached galleries. These images were too strong to show my class of high school students. They were too strong for me. People walked calmly past mounds of bodies piled in the streets. A man was caught on camera in his greatest moment of pain after finding his wife and ten-month-old baby on the top of a gruesome stack of dead human beings. My nightmares will be haunted by these pictures, but I chose to not bring those visions to my students.
It always strikes me at the oddest moments how blessed I am to be so safe and sheltered from the world’s tragedies. I can put my daughter to bed in her pink nursery and sip ice tea on my couch and almost forget that others are starving and frightened. It is so easy to see the victims as images on the news. But these are people with families and dreams, and when hell on Earth came to them, they had to survive and go on. Who am I to sit on my pedestal and pretend there is nothing that I can do? I can give blood. I can donate. I can spread the message. I can care. If we all just cared... Imagine the good we could do.
