The earth shakes and an empire trembles. In Caracas, the death toll climbs to 235, a number that will surely rise as rescue workers dig through the rubble. The modern Cassandras, those ever-present prophets of doom, will point to climate change or tectonic inevitability.
But I see something else. I see a civilisation that has lost its spine, a society grown flaccid on the soft couch of entitlement. The Venezuelan catastrophe is not a tragedy of geology; it is a tragedy of decay.
Look to the crumbling infrastructure, the electrical grid that fails at the first tremor, the hospitals that cannot cope. This is what happens when a nation abandons the virtues of hard work and prudence for the siren song of populism. It is the Fall of Rome replayed in miniature.
The Victorians knew how to build, how to endure. They would have mocked these ruins as a monument to incompetence. The rest of the world watches, tutting and wringing its hands.
But they should look closer. For Caracas is a mirror, and in its shattered glass, the West may glimpse its own future: a civilisation too comfortable, too complacent, too decadent to survive the next inevitable shock. The earthquake is just the messenger.
The real disaster is the rot within.
