What rattles me about tragedies like the earthquake in Haiti is that so many turn away from the news, magazines, papers et al with a sort of abstract indifference.  "It's not my problem"--or they don't feel that it *personally effects them*.  When 9/11 occured I heard more than one person say to another: "It's terrible, but I don't feel much about it personally."  This is the direct result of a capitalist culture which deludes us from birth to death into thinking that we are each somehow absolutely individual, without responsibility for our fellow man.  "Divide and conquer" is the dominant paradigm.  This is sheer nonsense, of course: each of us are joined at the hip, no matter how unique or "intellectual" we like to think we are.  Some feign moral outrage and then immediately return to their lives without an afterthought about how they would feel or operate in a horrendous situation.  The sad truth is that these things do happen to us in small ways every single day.  Maybe not an earthquake or a tsunami, but unless one lives on an island far away like Tom Hanks in that terrible movie, one's daily dialogue with others are filled with small, micro versions of these kind of evils.  A shooting here, a death there, mass poverty there, whatever the case--and until one does a little reflection to realize that the "other guy"--the guy who gets it, the guy who dies, the guy who suffers poverty, the homeless man one sees nearly freezing to death in the winter, the 15 year old buried beneath rubble in Haiti either is you or will be you,  the assistance provided for these horrid realities and the awareness of them will continue to decrease. Art, culture, employment cannot shield you forever from the inescapable fact that you are linked to other sentient beings inextricably.  It is not not necessary to recognize God's existence to help others.  But the recognition of a universal moral imperative is accessible to *anyone* who will take at the least a serious half hour of reflection on life itself.  Meditation, prayer, all these tools will quickly break down illusions of being an autonomous self.  I would urge anyone with just a little time to do what they can about this recent tragedy, be it by donating some money, spending time serious prayer, whatever is in your grasp.  We are, each and every one of us, "the other guy".