Last week I had a pleasant and stimulating conversation with Nick Flynn whose new book made mention of and was influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. That same day the very valuable web site Tomdistpatch.com published an eloquent and astute view of the current Haiti catastrophe by Solnit. Among the things that troubled her were the media coverage and the employment of the word “looting”:

And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

Rebecca Solnit is an original’s original whose writings are well worth becoming acquainted, and I urge you to read this essay in its entirety.