A late-arriving notice gave me just enough time to make it down to the Martin Luther King Day "stream walk" and join with about 10 adults and about twice as many kids to clean up trash and haul off junk.
We were working on the Turkey Branch of Rock Creek from the point where it emerges from underground across from the McDonalds in the Aspen Hill Shopping Center, down to where the stream comes close to the intersection of Grenoble Drive and Turkey Branch Parkway and where the Parkway is joined by the Matthew Henson State Park. Altogether, we were able to fully load my pickup a bit more than twice with refuse ranging from paper trash through bottles and cans and even including a TV tube and a defunct lawnmower.
Whether or not a good time was had by all, some years' worth of trash were removed. The event was organized by the Friends of Rock Creek's Environment. They have a very informative blog that makes good reading.
First off, I need to point out that although famed televangelist Pat Robertson's claim that ultimately the cause of Haiti's terribly tragic history is that "they made a pact with the devil" isn't rigorously true.
However, leaving out all questions of religion and theology, some of the initial rebellions were organized by a man who is very famous in Haitian lore, and as well known in the annals of the history of Haiti as known by any reputable historian.
Half a century later the much smarter and stealthier runaway Francois Makandal bought island-wide terror to the plantocracy.[20] Originally Mandingue, when Makandal lost an arm to the sugar mill, he claimed to have had a vision of the great cities of Guinea, magnificent in comparison to Haiti’s diminuitive capital Port-au-Prince, described by one European as “a Tartar camp”, its streets running with filth and its Christian churches with corruption. Immediately after his maiming, Makandal affected the role of prophet and built a considerable following in northern Limbe. By 1740, Makandal had fled to the Maroons and used their secret networks to build a force of thousands across Haiti, infiltrating every home and plantation and bringing poison to each, adapted from west African lore to local circumstances. Dependent on their servants, the plantocracy was helpless as one day their livestock died, the next their domestic animals, finally themselves and their families. 6,000 were killed before Makandal was through. The Whites’ powerlessness only increased their brutality. Laws were passed prohibiting slave preparation of any medicene except snakebite treatments, and all suspected poisoners were mercilessly tortured and burned. When — despite the strictest security, including the poisoning of any thought traitors — Makandal was finally betrayed and caught in 1757,[21] the attempt to burn him in the streets of Haiti’s second city, Cap-Francois, went awry. Though only one-armed, he fought free of his shackles and leapt from the flames. Rich Whites that had come to gloat fled in terror. Though soldiers said they recaptured the prophet and had thrown him back into the flames bound to a plank, the Blacks could not give up their symbol of liberation and so claimed Makandal had magically transformed himself into a fly and so escaped even that. Tropical Haiti abounds with flies, each a reminder of Makandal and ironically, they — or at least their cousins, the mosquitoes, as carriers of yellow fever — did have as big role to play in subsequent struggle for freedom. In his honour, even to this day, talismans, poisions and even an entire voodoo society bear Makandal’s name.
Makandal’s revolt may have laid an island-wise network of secret communication between the Maroon communities and into the towns and plantations, but it was as nothing compared to what the voodooists were to achieve from the Bois-Caiman ceremony of 14th August 1791.
[ ... ]
Thousands of plantocrats were strangled or battered to death that first night. Each atrocity was repayed in kind. Grenada-born Henri Christophe had a carpenter sawed to death between his own boards. With the war cry of “Vengeance! Vengeance!”, Jean Jacques Dessalines carried a White child impaled on a pike before him as a battle standard. As clear-sighted as the Luddites a generation later, the insurgent slaves had no interest in preserving any part of the system that was enslaving them and so destroyed without restraint.
Revolutions are never "pretty" and neither are slave rebellions. Haiti's was particularly nasty as it was not merely class warfare but race warfare and the cruelty and malice seen from all factions was epic is both scale and scope.
Yet it was as nothing compared to the scale and scope of the tragedy that continues to unfold on the island of Hispaniola.
The western part of Hispaniola lies directly atop a major fault bounding the Caribbean tectonic plate to surrounding plates.
Over the last 10 days -- both before and after the Haitian primary event (7.0 magnitude) -- there have been an increased frequency of quakes of magnitude 5.0 or above.
Rather worrisomely, many of these magnitude 5.0 and higher quakes are along very major plate boundaries that are not well known for such activity. For example, today's quake 5.0, Southern East Pacific Rise is somewhat unusual, as was yesterday's 6.3, Drake Passage quake.
The Drake Passage is the straits between the closest points of Antarctica and South America, and quite near to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet , which is believed to have reached a tipping point due to global warming and may be about ready to break up and slide off into the ocean. Perhaps this won't happen all at once, but in recent years, chunks as large as the State of Rhode Island have detached and drifted out to sea. So much ice has immense weight, and the sudden release of that much weight from along a major plate boundary could have effects all along related faults.
With this recent escalation of earthquake activity all around the so-called "ring of fire", and even earthquakes in the more stable North American tectonic plate central core -- in places such as today's 4.1 Central New Mexico quake and a January 15 4.0 magnitude quake in Jones, Oklahoma and a very unusual 2.7 magnitude quake between Toronto and Quebec -- we must regard events in Haiti with an eye to viewing a cautionary tale...
Because what is happening there may someday be what happens here.
Should history repeat itself, should the New Madrid Seismic Zone kick loose in a way it hasn't done in 200 years, we are all screwed.
More to come.
0 comments:
Post a Comment