Have you read the 2300 pages of the newly passed health care bill? I haven't either. But as one report summarized the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that the president signed this week, it is "the most sweeping expansion of government social policy in more than 40 years, and perhaps the most polarizing." Regardless of your personal convictions about the new health care law, most all of us are agreed that its protracted debate certainly did not bring out the best in civil discourse, did it?

At what point does a thinking person become concerned with nuclear proliferation in the Middle East? This Tuesday both Israel and Syria announced their intentions to produce atomic power plants, ostensibly for peaceful energy-generating purposes in their nations. And of course the world has been warily keeping an eye on Iran as it proceeds with its own nuclear power program. And now word on the street is that Egypt, Jordan and United Arab Emirates are also eager to develop their own nuclear power. And who’s to blame any of them?

In the space of one and a half months, our hemisphere has suffered two immense killer quakes—the 7.0 magnitude quake that leveled Port-au-Prince, Haiti, January 12, and left 230,000 dead and an entire country in economic ruin; and the magnitude 8.8 monster that ravaged Chile last Sabbath morning, unleashing destructive tsunamis in its wake (one eyewitness reported a wall of water “fifty feet” high).

Why are the “talking heads” so glum? Thomas Friedman, in his Sunday column in the New York Times, reported that because of the economic downturn the residents of Tracy, California, are now going to be charged to use their emergency 911 service. You can pay $48 a year to cover unlimited 911 calling, or you can wait and be billed $300 for every time you have an emergency. “Welcome to the lean years,” Friedman opined. For the past seventy years Americans have lived off the fat of the land.

A “G’day, Mate” to you from 850 new young friends in Australia! Karen and I just returned from two weeks “down under” with some of Australia’s best and brightest. I had the privilege of preaching fourteen times at two identical four-day Adventist Youth Conference (AYC) events in Melbourne and then in Sydney. And while we returned jet-lagged from the sixteen hour time change, we came home energized. And let me tell you why.

“An estimated 1 million kids orphaned by quake.” That stunning headline is enough to break your heart, isn’t it? Barely two weeks into the Haitian catastrophe, and the unfolding saga keeps peeling back layer after layer of the immense heartache and suffering that our Caribbean neighbors are enduring.

One of our Brazilian students, Tiago, sent me a video clip from Haiti. It was shot by a Brazilian U.N. peacekeeper soldier moments after the 7.0 magnitude quake struck Port-au-Prince a week ago. While I can’t understand the Portuguese voiceover or subtitles, the footage reality transcends all languages. Cement rubble lies strewn in the city street, a thick cloud of dust hovers above the surreal scene, while survivors stumble in a daze, in silence or with tears and screams.

Haiti’s devastating earthquake on Tuesday afternoon is our crisis, too. As I sit here and write the next morning, initial reports from Port-au-Prince indicate that much of the capital city of nearly 1.5 million residents lies buried beneath collapsed rubble, as the result of the 7.0 magnitude record-breaking temblor. The Parliament building, the presidential palace, the United Nations mission headquarters, hospitals, schools, churches and untold numbers of apartments, houses and tenement buildings have been flattened.

Do you really think new “pat down” measures at the airport will make air travel more secure? I read a piece by syndicated British columnist Gwynne Dyer, and I’m afraid he’s right.

Poor Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary—he can’t even show up at a holiday party without being cornered by another distraught denizen of the English-speaking world with the query, “What are we supposed to call the decade that’s now ended?” Pretend you’re the editor of the dictionary—how would you answer all those emails? After all, we call the 80’s the 80’s and the 90’s the 90’s. But what shall we call the 00’s? The Zeroes? Hardly. How about the Aughts (English for the number 0)? Or the Ohs? Or the Oh-Ohs (I like that one!)?