In The Boston Review, Junot Díaz considers the important role apocalypse plays in breaking down our ignorance and denial.

Apocalypse comes to us from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning to uncover and unveil. Now, as James Berger reminds us in After the End, apocalypse has three meanings. First, it is the actual imagined end of the world, whether in Revelations or in Hollywood blockbusters. Second, it comprises the catastrophes, personal or historical, that are said to resemble that imagined final ending—the Chernobyl meltdown or the Holocaust or the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan that killed thousands and critically damaged a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Finally, it is a disruptive event that provokes revelation. The apocalyptic event, Berger explains, in order to be truly apocalyptic, must in its disruptive moment clarify and illuminate “the true nature of what has been brought to end.” It must be revelatory.

By “reading the ruins” of Haiti, Díaz hopes the world is forced to recognize the existential crisis of poverty-stricken places like Haiti, to understand that the earthquake itself was only the “slightest shove” which pushed Haiti over the brink, that disasters like Haiti (or Katrina or Japan) are not natural, but social disasters, and that these disasters are all part of a larger threat of “global inequality.” While disasters certainly do force people to look and care about foreign lands and distant problems, Diaz acknowledges that it’s a wildly idealistic notion to think that disasters can truly drive people to fighting global problems. “Truth be told,” he writes, “I’m not very optimistic. I mean, just look at us….More than a year later, we can say safely that the world has looked away. It has failed to learn the lesson of the apocalypse of Haiti.”

His essay ends on an ominous note that is part hope, part threat. Eventually, he says, there will be a disaster big enough that forces us to truly take stock of the world and change our ways:

After all, apocalypses like the Haitian earthquake are not only catastrophes; they are also opportunities: chances for us to see ourselves, to take responsibility for what we see, to change. One day somewhere in the world something terrible will happen, and for once we won’t look away….One day somewhere in the world something terrible will happen and for once we will heed the ruins. We will begin collectively to take responsibility for the world we’re creating. Call me foolishly utopian, but I sincerely believe this will happen. I do. I just wonder how many millions of people will perish before it does.