Two-year-old Miracles. Six days buried. The UK sends doctors.
How quaint. How very British. We rush in with our stethoscopes and our sterilised gauze, as if treating the symptoms of a fever that has already consumed the patient.
The earthquake in Venezuela is not a tragedy, it is a punctuation mark. A full stop at the end of a sentence that began with Hugo Chávez, was edited by Nicolás Maduro, and will now be closed by the IMF. The rescue of little Isabella Rodriguez (for that is her name, the papers tell us) is a triumph of human spirit.
But what of the thousands still buried? What of the civilisation that has been buried for over a decade? The UK's medical aid is a bandage on a severed artery.
While we tend to the wounded, the real disease spreads: economic collapse, political paralysis, the slow rot of a society that has forgotten how to produce anything except oil and resentment. Blaming the tectonic plates is convenient. But the real earthquake was man-made.
It started in 2013, when Maduro inherited a house of cards. It started in 2007, when Chávez nationalised the last functioning enterprises. It started in the 1980s, when the debt bonanza began.
The rescue of a toddler makes for fine headlines. It justifies our aid budgets, our humanitarian credentials. But let us not mistake charity for solution.
The Venezuelan state is a cadaver. We are merely applying makeup. The lesson for the UK?
Our own infrastructure is fragile. Our own national unity is fraying. Earthquakes do not discriminate.
The next one might be beneath London, and we will have no Maduro to blame, only our own decades of decadence. So by all means, cheer for the child. Fund the doctors.
But keep one eye on the horizon. The earth is shifting, and it does not care for our sympathies.
