Such things are hard to gauge, of course, but the disaster in Haiti seems to be resonating with particular strength in The United States. Proximity and our history there explain some of this. But maybe our level of interest is raised by the tremors of America’s worst decade and the quake of the financial crisis. Maybe we see our own instability in Haiti’s devastation.

In Haiti, the government buildings collapsed. Hospitals are down. Houses have fallen from their hill side moorings in horrific mass.

In America, The White House and The Capital Building do stand, but only rich people ever enter. For the rest of us, they may as well be in pieces. Hospitals are up and running, but the emergency of affordable health care led to public debate little better than screaming, the health care bill we needed largely a boondoggle for special interests. And while foreclosure is not the same as digging through rubble for loved ones, the last few years have lest countless Americans home owners living a life of nightmare rather than dream.

“Too big to fail,” means, in essence, one more shake and the whole system comes down. During the financial crisis, as part of selling us the bank bailout, Americans were more or less invited to imagine a nationwide disaster. Yet it seems now the bailout did not repair the foundation so much as hand out golden stilts to those who had been digging dangerously underneath it all along. We did not move away from Haitian precariousness, we moved toward it.

And this week’s questioning of Wall Street bankers demonstrates what a banana republic we actually are. People who got rich betting against their own clients and their own country now claim themselves too clueless to have seen the crisis coming. (A strange defense for those who also claim being indispensable justifies billions in bonuses.) Cronies in a corrupt military dictatorship behave just so and in any common sense America this group would be defending themselves in court, not putting on a show trial with their business buddies in Congress. The dots that connected Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to his explosive underwear were altogether cryptic compared to those linking what Wall Street does, what our government refuses to control, and the fact that one in four children in this country are now on food stamps. The companies that used to provide middle class jobs for the average citizen of this nation were leveraged out and sold off. In these man made disasters investment bankers become fabulously wealthy while the rest of us get sick from the turbulence of their tremors.

Of course the shenanigans that go on in Washington between money and power have always been shameful, but more and more it looks like an earthquake ready to hit a shanty town, our county propped up on unregulated greed rather than built on industriousness, hard work, and decency.

Infamously, Lloyd Blankenfeld claimed bankers like himself do “God’s work.” Meanwhile, God’s plan, according to Pat Robertson’s notion that Haiti is cursed, is to kill people Robertson does not like. As extreme and obnoxious as these comments may seem, both occupy a rhetorical space constructed by P.R. firms and the demand for ratings, a form of language common to those completely removed from how actual people live and suffer, whether in post GM Detroit or post earthquake Port-o-Prince. When did “Let them eat God” become such an acceptable excuse for profiting from the devils work?

The decade began with a monumental mis-read of a disaster. George Bush saw 9/11 as the start of a war against a place, against a “them,” rather than an example that might unite the whole world in the value of restraint and love. It is always interesting to wonder what would have happened had our most avowedly “saved” president turned the other cheek and dropped water, food, and aid–rather than bombs–into Iraq and Afghanistan. Hard to believe we would be any worse off than we are today. In any case, ever since we chose to kill rather than to give, our economic and moral strength has dwindled and become more porous. Cursed, Pat Robertson might say.

Now Haiti needs water, food and aid, the image of a collapsed society reflecting our own weakness and reminding us what God’s work really is. Speak to each other in reasonable terms, feed our children, care for each other, work at decent jobs in a reasonable way. That makes a nation like ours strong. Otherwise, the powers that be–God, nature, history–will catch up to us too, if they have not already.