Jim Hopkins: Earthquake should be seen as the great escape

Eighty per cent of Christchurch has been left virtually unscathed. Photo / Sarah Ivey

You must have heard some tragic stories" - Interviewer. "Well, some people are worried about their pets." - Answer.

On Tuesday morning, the radio host was talking to people in Christchurch. Three days earlier, the Earth had done to us what it did to Haiti.

It moved. The fault line shrugged, indifferent and absolute. The plates on which life rests went their separate ways and, 33km above, inanimate things were broken and bent and people tossed awake.

Chimneys fell, houses cracked, pipes burst. In places the ground turned to porridge, Creamoata with grass, and things sank into the soil.

Minutes later, the world knew what had happened. That's how it is now. We know everything as soon as it happens.

A bomb explodes, as thousands did in London 70 years ago, and the news channels are live on the scene. They get pictures, we get pictures, people speak indistinctly on crackly phones, fragments of experience emerge, experts deliver sage opinions, the drama unfolds, distant but instant and everyone watches.

Information is the fastest food of all and the chefs know what we like. Something juicy, spicy, a tasty sugar rush of shock or outrage, fear or fury.

It may not be good for us to feast on famine and mayhem but feast we do. Every day scourges loom, nightmares awake and horrors seep through the cracks into our consciousness.

No threat goes unchecked. No menace is ignored. Day after day, mealtime after mealtime, the Bad Macs keep on coming.

Over time, people have learned how to behave when disaster calls and the reporters arrive. They cry. When bad things happen in countries overseas, we watch people weep.

Telly loves tears. That's why the camera zooms in. No matter how minor the moment, tears are shed. In Australia this week, a female athlete in trouble for using the word "faggot" sobbed on cue as she tendered her abject apology. Tears define our dramas.

But not on Saturday. On Saturday, people joked and made light of the chimney that had fallen through the roof. They laughed ruefully as they said they'd have to move out of the house.

They joked about digging a dunny in the garden. They made the best of a very bad job. Every time he was interviewed, the Mayor of Christchurch said it was a miracle no one had died. We've lost things, he said, but we haven't lost people.

Happily, our scribes are made of sterner stuff. This was a disaster and would be treated as such. In the days that followed, as the aftershocks continued, so did less noteworthy calamities.

"Breaking news," the radio shrilled one morning. "Six people have been put in quarantine after reports of possible gastro-enteritis."

Ahhh, "quarantine", now there's a word. Like "epidemic" or its new chum "liquefaction", it stirs primal memories of plague or natural calamity - it resurrects the scourge of the virus as liquefaction does the callousness of planets. So it's "breaking news" that six people are in quarantine. No, it's not. There's a sad credulity about such instant flashes. They lack perspective. Six people in quarantine? With a tummy bug? Someone should have spiked that story.

Along with the adjectives all week, Canterbury's been "quake-ravaged, quake-devastated" or "quake-stricken". Except it isn't. And it wasn't. Parts of it are and that is an awful thing.

But most of Canterbury isn't ravaged, devastated or stricken and neither is Christchurch. On Wednesday, Gerry Brownlee told an interviewer that 20 per cent of the city was a mess but 80 per cent was virtually unscathed.

And nobody died. In the past month, wild fires in Russia and floods in Pakistan and China have taken hundreds of lives. The Haiti earthquake killed 230,000 people.

And it was no more powerful than the one that shook an unknown fault here on Saturday morning.

The real story of our earthquake is that it has done so little damage and caused so little grief. The real story of our earthquake is that only 400 people in a city of 360,000 needed special shelter.

The real story of our earthquake is a hundred thousand unsung acts of kindness, publicly evidenced by all those Facebook recruits in Sam Johnson's Student Army.

Which brings us back to Tuesday's question. The host in Auckland was interviewing a helper at the Addington Welfare Centre. She said 189 people had stayed overnight and expected more may arrive.

"You must have heard some tragic stories," said the interviewer. The woman paused. She appeared to know what was expected of her and did her best.

"Well, some people are worried about their pets," she replied.

When we build a monument to mark this violent event, those are the words that should be carved on the plinth. Not to minimise or trivialise the damage done but to put it into context and to celebrate what is, in truth, a great escape.

"Some people were worried about their pets". Carve that in stone and let the words reflect the strength of the things we've made and the resilience we're made of.