Blog Post - Junot Diaz - Apocalypse: What Disasters May Reveal

Diaz makes a very crucial point with this essay, one which I had not considered myself. The damage of a "natural disaster" extends far beyond the point at which such disasters fall out of the forefront of public news. Haiti, viewed here as a symbol for the imminent future of society, creates a powerful image of devastation on all fronts (economic, social, structural, etc), one that we may see extended to the rest of the world sooner than we imagine. At the completion of my high school career, I returned home from boarding school to find a nearly post-apocalyptic scene in my bedroom: The walls were lined with nearly 14 years of junk, the closets were overflowing, and the space entirely cramped. Over the next 2-3 weeks, I went through a long and difficult, albeit incredibly cathartic process of cleaning out the entirety of the room. Over that period, I went through every item or scrap in the space and got rid of everything I didn't want. In essence, I was cleaning out my life. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and in it, I see a parallel to the current state of affairs: The powers that be are nothing more than a big teenager who doesn't want to clean his room. With a disaster like Haiti or Japan, it's almost as if the big teenager has just broken a lamp in the room, and instead of throwing out the pieces and starting new, he instead decides to polish the shards scattered across the floor, leaving them sitting there, perfectly situated to step on later.