Haiti Presidential Palace Badly Damaged
To the objective eye, Reuters captured a stunning photo of what the 7.0 earthquake did to Haiti's presidential palace. However, Lee Hockstader on the Washington Post's PostPartisan blog says it could be more of a symbolic act, given Haitians' perceptions of the structure:
The palace is a vast, gleaming, white confection, an otherworldly symbol of power in a country where power is regarded with awe, reverence, envy and fear. In Haiti, whose political stability is always iffy, the risk is that the broken palace will be equated with the breakdown of any semblance of order.
The death toll, which has yet to be estimated, is going to be dismal no matter what it is. Haiti president René Préval can't fathom the devastation himself. Nor can any of us.
The damaged palace should sum it up. This affected everyone in Haiti. And with countries everywhere sending supplies and workers to the island, it ought to reaffirm a lesson in where true power lies: within fellow human beings.
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