Somehow I missed it. Almost the entire thing. I was busy, as you can imagine, running up and down my Facebook page and the streets of Baltimore. Spending precious hours mooching neighborhood cafe WiFi and waiting for something to do. This is why it was two days before I heard about the earthquake in Haiti.

We have a tendency to joke that our lives as college students extract us from the larger world. We exist on an island where our news comes by e-mail and our food by dining hall. Papers and events exist only in the community we have established to occupy ourselves, while somewhere else, far removed from the present state of our lives, other worlds exist. People cry out with gut-wrenching sorrow. Maybe we will be flicking through channels one day and see them screaming on the ruined streets, and it will feel horrible. But quickly, the story will end, and we will turn off the television, head out to the bar, forget the glimpse we received.

It’s a problem presented by many international crises. Haiti is not the first time we have been exposed to the utter destruction of a third-world country and felt helpless in the most impotent way. No doubt memories of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami circle around with the latest crisis to reach our awareness. Even with the copious use of Twitter and social networking sites to spread news quickly and aid in bridging the gap between places, we are still so far away. That which brings us together also heightens the distance between us. It is hard to feel we can reach somewhere so far away both geographically and socially. The little that these people had has been reduced to nothing at all. Can we fathom that? Can we put ourselves in that position, either sympathetically or empathetically? It is hard and we always appear too slow on the uptake to move ourselves to provide sufficient aid, but is it ever possible to be fast enough? There is no standard for the type of speed needed, there is only an immediate need there and us here and a distance that translates to time, and time is never fast enough.

What appears worse is that there is no one to blame. There is no terrorist ring or gang racket or government corruption here, just the ebb and flow of natural cycles. There is no retaliation on the movement of tectonic plates. Left in the hollow of blame there is an impotent feeling of helplessness and the futile desire to understand why. The only option is to turn in circles on ourselves: to blame the calloused and removed public, the lazy government, the misused funds, the disorganized efforts to help.

It seems sometimes as if all we can do is watch, while what we watch changes. As the month since the earthquake occurred has passed, our connection to Haiti has shifted to more immediate news of snowfall and scandal. Meanwhile, people still ache, but the distance of both time and space makes it hard for us to feel the extent of this tragedy. Statistics say over 200,000 people have died, but numbers so high do not seem to elicit a more sympathetic response.

Some, like columnist Shankar Vedantam*, have noted that widespread incidents of tragedy don’t cause us to feel any more sympathetic to the cause. This is not to say that at heart people are terrible, but that it is harder for us to sympathize on a mass level when we are but one person. Our capacity for empathy is limited in certain respects to the individual who is like us, with whom we can relate. It is hard for us to capture the extent of massive loss of life, and eventually we turn away, unable to identify with the magnitude, able only to think that it is ‘tragic’ without feeling as if it were our own.

Now that we realize the distance of time, space, culture and nature is against us, what else is there to do? Do we lie down and accept that aid is futile? Do we turn off the television and go back to playing in the snow? What is remarkable about human beings is that when all these factors pit themselves against us we still fight to help.

The best thing we might be able to do is give. I admit, I fear that in writing an article addressing our perception of the event rather than the facts of the event itself, I am in fact taking away the focus on those affected and putting it on us, but the truth is none of this is about us as college students or Americans, it is about humans as people. This is not about perception, but about reality in the individuals still bereft, shocked and homeless. Are we able to see outside of our collegiate island to the places where people are still without roofs in a looming rainy season?

There is a certain need for us to continue with our lives: we do not all have the speculation needed to take the next flight out, repair the wounded or console the bereft. It would do little good for us to stay stranded in catatonic sorrow. But at the same time we cannot act as if the damage has already been repaired and lives restored. It may be that Haiti does not recover for decades, while in another month the television will stop showing aftermath and move on. But that does not mean everything is over, and that does not mean we need to turn away as told. All of the time, distance, cultural separation and disaffected nature mean nothing when we think of one person lost in a maze of devastation.

*Taken from an excerpt from his book “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives,” published in the Washington Post, January 17, 2010. < http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/11/AR2010011102007.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010011304181>