October 2, On Haiti

Imagine having a storm come through your town. Imagine that it is so bad that you can't count the dead. Imagine that there are so many dead people that they load them into dump trucks and dump them in a hole and cover them over.

That's what's going on in Haiti right now.

Imagine that your adult child lives on the other side of town and you can't locate him or her and you spend weeks looking. And you figure more and more that the person whose fragile body you once cradled in your arms was tossed in a hole with a mess of other people. But you will never know.

This isn't taking place across the world. It's a few hundred miles off the coast of Florida, in a place where cruise ships pass by and stop.

Imagine that there is so much wrong that no matter what you do, it will not cause any major changes for the better. Imagine looking out on people and knowing that the food you have to give them will feed only a fraction.

Imagine standing in the mob that is waiting for food and knowing that you timed it wrong and got there late and that your kids are going to be hungry for the next several days as a result.

We live in a wonderful land. I can walk to any of three supermarkets and get food without waiting in line. And I can get food that I really like there, and just pass it up if I don't like it. I have never had to send my children to bed hungry because there was no food. I have never had to listen to them cry themselves to sleep because they don't know when they are going to eat again.

It seems to me that when we look at the problems of the world, this particular one should be more important than it is. But how do you fix it? What can you do about it? With a corrupt government, you can pour all the money in the world into the problem and it won't make a difference. Freedom--political freedom--is vital for people to prosper.

But we aren't talking about prospering. We're talking about mass starvation and pits in which piles of what used to be people are placed. I can't imagine the level of heartache there.