Haiti: Where was God? or Where were we?

The understandably inevitable question after a natural disaster or massacre is “Where was God?” Ben Witherington III (BW3) discussed this recently and offered pointed thoughts.

But what I wanted to pull out specifically was the following quote.

Haiti has been a disaster happening and waiting to happen for ever. Had most of the buildings in Port au Prince been strengthened or rebuilt to withstand such disasters, literally millions of people would have been less likely to be harmed in that city by what has just happened. And we have known about these problems in our own backyard for decades. For decades now the U.S. would rather throw good money after bad on military adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere when in fact with a fraction of what we have spent in the last decade on war the entire country of Haiti could have been rebuilt and given decent housing!! Yes its true. And these are our backdoor neighbors. But of course they do not have oil and other commodities to offer us, so we as a nation have largely ignored them and their cries for help, hoping that the piecemeal efforts of small U.N. and Christian agencies would pick up the slack—which they have been unable to do, so overwhelmed have they been by the grinding indigenous poverty and needs of that whole country, not to mention governmental corruption over many decades.

Where were we (in particular the Church, but that can also extend to the US) before any of this happened? A 7.0 earthquake can occur today in the Los Angeles area and maybe a couple of older bridges could collapse. Maybe a few older apartment complexes could have some structural damages. Possibly some people could lose their lives. But nowhere near 3 million people would be homeless. Nowhere near the entire city would be in a pile of blood and rubble. Nowhere near 100,000 would be dead. I’m not arguing that we need to help every poor nation on Earth with their buildings and infrastructure. That’s not practical. But Haiti is our close neighbor, and we’d rather shell out nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars to fund a war in Iraq (which, remember, was completely unjustifiable). It would have cost only a fraction of that to shore up Port au Prince and the surrounding impoverished areas against major disasters.