Of Stampedes and Mudslides

For the second time in weeks our attention has been commanded by another human tragedy in the Philippines. First, there was a deadly stampede in Manila that claimed 74 lives, mostly poor, elderly women and children. And now a landslide wiped out the entire village of Guinsaugon in Southern Leyte. The initial count: 1,800 residents buried under some 30 feet of mud. Early reports noted that as many as 300 elementary students were trapped in their school when the rain-soaked mountain came crashing down.
A Philippine Inquirer editorial noted that the Guinsaugon tragedy is “worse” than the stampede at the Ultra sports center:
“There is the absolute unexpectedness of it all; the victims had not joined a queue for the chance to win big or small prizes. Many of them were simply going about their ordinary business; a number of them had in fact gone back to the village because, after two weeks of rain, the weather looked like it had finally cleared. Then the devastation - the mountain shook, and an entire barangay disappeared."
One eyewitness describing the Ultra stampede said it “occurred very fast, almost like a momentary madness descending upon a community." Afterwards, people recounted how their children were torn off from their grasp by the sheer force of the crowd. Mothers called for their loved ones, but the wailing sounded more like lamentations, as if they knew their kids would never come back.
But in Guinsaugon, there were no parents calling for their children. No one was left to claim the dead. Except for a few survivors, the village was gone.
So who’s to blame for these disasters?
The people who lined up at the sports center were there out of desperation, out of need to make some money. As columnist Randy David puts it, “mass poverty set the stage for the tragedy, and mass media commercialism made it happen." Conrado de Quiros, another commentator, described the ferocity of the shoving and trampling as something “reserved only for their life-and-death struggles. Kapit sa Patalim.
Surviving by the skin of your teeth. The children, women and men who were crushed to death at Ultra were there were there to cling to life. They were there trusting in God, luck and gratuity."
The mudslides, on the other hand, are being blamed on mining, logging and denuding of Philippine forests. In 1991, Southern Leyte was the scene of one of the country’s worst disasters when more than 5,000 people died in floods triggered by a typhoon. Environmental groups blamed illegal logging for making the flooding worse.
The Philippine Inquirer ends its editorial with a question:
“How can God, or Allah, or Providence, allow something like this to happen? ... There are no easy answers; there may in fact be no answer. But the Christian faith that a majority of Filipinos still profess to follow offers a radical response: Those who believe in a suffering God believes that  their God is right there among the suffering."
After church that Sunday following the disaster, I talked to our pastor about how distressing it is to the human spirit to know that nature cannot be trusted. Is the creator God involved in the natural world? What does it mean when the Bible says that “God finally prevails over chaos to sustain life and keep it safe?" It does not mean, I am told, that suffering and death will not happen to innocent human beings. “From a Christian perspective," my pastor assures me, “there is a dynamic going on in and through even the most horrific suffering that will finally be redemptive."
Or, as one theologian puts it, “God’s problem is not that God can’t do certain things. God’s problem is that God loves! Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every human life."
As I was pondering all of this, I recall the time my wife and I took our daughter to college. We had to do a most extraordinary thing:
letting our only child go. So we took her to Ithaca College New York, helped her settle in her dorm, said our goodbyes, left her alone and drove back to Maryland. But, we told ourselves, she won’t really be alone. Our love will remain with her. In time she will understand that our leaving was not abandonment, but the full _expression of our love.
“The finest thing love can do is give the gift of freedom," says my pastor. “It is not without pain, nor is it without risk. But genuine love lets go, backs away, gets in the car and drives off, and allows a beloved child the freedom necessary for her authentic personhood, with all the risk that entails."
As with Katrina, the Leyte mudslides and all the other natural disasters, the biblical issue concerns what one religious leader calls “the human refusal to be responsible” about the environment and global warming; it concerns “the human engineering that violates nature’s wisdom" about rivers and forests; and it targets the political insensitivity of government leaders who ignore warnings and essentially abandons their helpless citizens.
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