Certainly one of the greatest disasters of the modern age

truly horrifying in a country that was a nightmare to begin with...

Tens of thousands of Haitians slept on sidewalks or wandered the streets of this heavily damaged city early Thursday, a sign of the vast homelessness emerging after the devastating earthquake.

[...]

Bodies lay everywhere: tiny children next to schools, women in rubble-strewn streets with stunned expressions frozen on their faces, men hidden beneath plastic tarps and cotton sheets. Desperate residents turned pickup trucks and wheelbarrows into ambulances and doors into stretchers, the Associated Press reported, trying to ferry the dead and wounded even as they acknowledged that help was almost impossible to find.

[...]

In the central Bel Air neighborhood, the streets and sidewalks were covered with people sleeping on mattresses, plastic chairs and bits of cardboard. Survivors set up camps amid piles of salvaged goods, including food being scavenged from the rubble.

[...]

Indeed, the neighborhood had largely been reduced to rubble. Flames licked from the shell of one ruined building. Balconies had crashed to the ground. Cars were buried under chunks of gray concrete the size of dining-room tables. The street was littered with bricks, shattered plastic chairs, glittering shards of glass.

Huge crowds swarmed through the city overnight, carrying meager possessions -- a cooking pot, a sack of vegetables -- and shoeless toddlers with terrified eyes. Many people had wrapped themselves in bedsheets, adding to the ghostly air.

it's a heart-wrenching experience to read of a disaster of this magnitude... i'm experiencing a depth of feeling for these people similar to what i experienced as the epic catastrophe of katrina unfolded...

what i don't get is how our erstwhile secretary of state, hillary clinton, can say something like this, an entirely true statement imho, without making the connection that the united states has produced precisely the same situation for the afghanistan people without benefit of an act-of-god natural disaster...

"In the wake of disasters like this, people do get desperate," Clinton said in a televised interview with CNN. "If you have a starving baby in your arms, you're going to find food wherever you can."

yes, hillary... desperate people do desperate things... when they can't feed or take care of their families and are left with no options, they are very vulnerable to doing things they might never otherwise consider... what happened in haiti and what's happening in afghanistan are both hugely tragic but the one was and is preventable...

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