I hadn't really been keeping up with the story of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria even as the death toll has mounted up over recent days. Then I looked closely this morning at the picture on the front page of the Journal. It showed a guy sitting in a folding chair holding the hand of his daughter. The rest of her was buried beneath the rubble of their home and she wasn't breathing or waiting for help to arrive. I started reading the article. In the first couple of paragraphs was an exchange that read like a parable. "I buried my children yesterday." "Oh, you were able to find yours?" It was too much. I had to stop reading to refocus and get ready for the day.
As the story of this calamity is written, who knows whether we'll learn something like we did in 2008 when the collapse of a school in Sichuan killing thousands was attributed to lax construction practices as contractors took shortcuts to cut costs and grease the palms of officials. Or even with the Florida condo collapse a couple of years ago, where we can see that cost aversion by a Board of tenants was a major contributor to the collapse. Maybe this earthquake was just too big and would have killed a bunch of people no matter how well the buildings were constructed.
But I'm almost certain that better governance could have saved lives here somehow. Some of these people are the victims of Erdogan, Assad and the place their respective countries occupy in the latest Great Game of diplomacy. Hard-working and earnest technocrats operating in concert via international organizations coordinating with local polities are mankind's best hope for managing down tragic deaths and improving the human condition in aggregate.
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