Friday, January 15, 2010, 3:25 PM
Celebrities, In the News, Stop the Presses
By Kevin Moreau

Haiti, Pat Robertson and Doomsday

The Doomsday Clock is set at six minutes to midnight.

You’re familiar with the Doomsday Clock, right? It’s a symbol of our proximity to global destruction, with midnight representing the end of civilization. It was first “set” at seven minutes to midnight in 1947, and has gone as high as two minutes to midnight.

The current adjustment—one minute back from five minutes to midnight, where it was set in 2007—represents a shift toward a “hopeful state of world affairs” in regards to nuclear annihilation and climate change, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which maintains the clock.

But the truth is that we are always just moments away from tragedy. If there’s a lesson to be learned from the devastation that has befallen Haiti, it is a simple one: that the pleasures of this world—the tender kiss of a loved one, the gurgle of an infant—are all the sweeter because they can be taken from us in an instant. The world is a beautiful and terrible place, full of unspeakable joys and incomprehensible horrors.

And while many of those horrors are the result of capricious, unblinking nature, far too many of them are delivered by our own hands. That is the double-edged sword of our existence. The redeeming power of love walks hand in hand with our appalling capacity for hatred. The better angels that call us to reach out to our brothers and sisters coexist with the demons that exhort us to strike them down, for no other reasons than the unforgiveable sins of race, gender, sexual orientation, belief system or political affiliation.

The Doomsday Clock was adjusted to its current setting on Jan. 14, just one day after televangelist Pat Robertson implied that the massive earthquake that destroyed much of Haiti was a direct result of “a pact to the devil” made by Haitians in the early 19th century to release themselves from slavery.

If we are indeed scant minutes away from the end of the world, it’s in large part because of Robertson and others like him, cynical manipulators who divide in the name of unity.

You and I can only do so much to stay the hand of Mother Nature, or to arrest nuclear proliferation. But there’s plenty we can do about those who exploit the suffering and heartbreak of millions around the world, and play to man’s basest fears, for their own ends. We can condemn them. We can ignore them. Better still, we can hold their lies up to the light of truth and reason, and help to turn back the clock.