Can one get used to earthquakes?

The İzmir earthquake, like all earthquakes, shook not only İzmir but all of Turkey, and, as in all other earthquakes, it did not bring down only buildings constructed on rotten foundations and with deficient materials. Evidently it is also shaking, and perhaps demolishing, many feelings and thoughts within us that have rotted, been built on wrong foundations, and outlived their term.

Many people died, and we asked God's mercy for the dead, but in every lifeless body pulled from beneath the rubble we saw a little of our own death, our own helplessness, and in all its tragedy how much in life is beyond our control and does not belong to us...

An earthquake is a destiny of humankind. Living with earthquakes with such stock phrases, the possibility of building buildings, cities and environments that would never be affected by an earthquake... Surely this has a place in the book. It is surely an ideal that must be striven for, and in fact on this point Turkey has come a considerable distance after the 1999 earthquakes. But however far one comes, earthquakes are a destiny of humankind as inhabitants of the earth.

A possibility slightly less in some places, slightly more in others. Japan, for example, closest to the earthquake belt yet one of the world's most precautionary countries against earthquakes, is a country taken as the reference for earthquake-resistant construction standards. We remember what devastation the magnitude 9 earthquake of 2011 caused. Although construction there is normally prepared even for a magnitude of 9, the unpredictable movement of the earthquake that came and the catastrophe in the tsunami that followed showed that one cannot be overly confident about earthquakes.

Earthquakes also shake people's consciousness of their relationship with life. Without destroying, indeed while strengthening further, the awareness that one must hold on to the means to the very end, they remind us once again that ultimately life and death are not in our control.

Do not baby Elif, who came out from under the rubble after 3 days, or baby Ayda, who came out alive after 91 hours, remind us of the Owner of this will, rekindling a light of hope and faith in us in the most vivid way?

Is not the shield that protected that tiny life for 91 hours under the rubble in fact over us every day and every moment? Is not every moment all of us live, every breath we take, every minute we remain alive possible thanks to that shield of protection?

Is it not our having become indifferent to the miracles that take place within our bodies beyond our will, in every moment, in every breath we draw and release, that makes having stayed 91 hours under the rubble look to us like a miracle?

Beside all these countless miracles, is the miracle of having survived alive 91 hours under the rubble really so great? Perhaps to notice those miracles too, we will need the tiny miracle of baby Ayda, whose smile makes gardens of paradise bloom within humanity.

We were glad that a mistake we had so often witnessed on the occasion of earlier earthquakes was not being repeated much this time, when it was seen that an insolent person tried to muddy the waters with his messages and sabotage the climate of beautiful solidarity and shared feeling that had formed, even if on the occasion of an earthquake.

A person named Asena Türk, who uses a picture with a headscarf on her profile, posted an extremely provocative tweet reading: “Get well soon to the Muslim people of the 6.8 earthquake in İzmir Aegean, O Lord! Not like the people of İzmir toward adultery, toward my ego, let me die on my prayer rug... Amen!”

If you ask, tweeting is a field in which freedom of expression and democracy and tolerance are tested. Whoever posted such a tweet, whether someone with a headscarf or a devout person, there could be nothing excusable about posting such a tweet. Indeed, there could probably be no more striking and convincing example to explain the evil and unacceptability of using social media for this kind of provocation.

Indeed, it turned out that the person who posted the tweet was a man with no relationship to Turkishness, the headscarf, or devoutness. A provocateur who set out, purely to do evil, to make people hate the devout, to play the most disgusting, most revolting role that could be imagined in the name of the devout.

Of course it is inevitable that people turn to some reflection, to some reckoning about their lives on account of the earthquake. How could they not? How is it possible to remain indifferent to this scene in which life and death are made to be lived by us in their most tragic and most shocking form? But the attitudes of those who immediately appropriate and exploit the warning dimension of the earthquake, the lessons it may contain, and instrumentalize it to reinforce their own stance are equally instructive.

Perhaps the earthquake warns such people before anyone else, yet they generally take nothing of that warning upon themselves. They immediately move the earthquake to their own side and count it as proof of their rightness against those they regard as adversaries. Somehow, those who take the earthquake as a warning are always interested in what it says to others, not in what it says to themselves.