My wife came home Wednesday and reported something astonishing.

"No one sent me any attack e-mails today."

You have to understand. My wife is one of the few newspaper reporters still working in a Washington bureau. She gets hundreds of e-mails a day, and most of them are slagging someone (or some party) or another. These come from both major parties and scads of interest groups, many of whom torch the same folks they extolled not a week earlier.

This sort of slash-and-burn existence has always annoyed me, but I can only imagine having to navigate through all that crap every day. For this and other reasons, I don't watch news on TV, unless something really interesting is happening. The last time I watched was election night 2008.

My wife being a journalist and all, she did a little checking around to see if her vitriol-free Wednesday was common. In fact, all of her co-workers reported the same thing: All quiet on the partisan front.

Hundreds of hateful e-mails a day, suddenly silenced last Wednesday. Why?

The earthquake in Haiti, of course.

Sometimes something smacks the asshole right out of you. For a day, at least.

And then folks like Pat Robertson come along, claiming that the Lord was on the side of the French slaveholders in 18th century Haiti and that He's still cursing the country today because the slaves had the nerve to revolt. That sort of thing is more than enough to prime the pump. By Thursday, the vitriol was flowing freely once again.

In the last couple of days, I've read some serious writing exploring the idea that the just about all of the suffering in Haiti is the result of an almost non-existent government and a barely-functioning society. While a few folks on the left decry this sort of analysis (I've seen the cry of "racism" raised), there are statistics that back up these ideas.

The Haiti quake has a preliminary magnitude of 7.1 on the Richter Scale. The 1994 Northridge earthquake (centered in the L.A. region) was a 6.7 magnitude quake that caused 60 deaths. The 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta quake of 1989 (the so-called World Series earthquake that struck just north of San Francisco and caused an elevated freeway to collapse) killed 63. The 1995 Kobe, Japan, quake (6.9), which occurred in an almost unimaginably densely populated area, killed 5,502.

The official estimate of deaths in Haiti stands at 50,000, although many are claiming numbers higher than 200,000. It doesn't matter. The difference between Haiti and the quakes in California and Japan is staggering. There are reasons, and it's not only legitimate but imperative that we examine them. We should be able to do that without name-calling, but that's just not possible. After our one-day era of good feeling, we're back to the same old, same old.

There are things that are more important than ideology. In fact, most of the problems that face our nation are more important than abstract notions of how the world ought to be. For about 12 hours, we were shocked into forgetting our stupid animosities. We were moved to think of something other than our petty differences.

Sooner or later, though, reality sets in. It's a grim reality, one that favors venal carping to noble work. Indeed, there are thousands of people inside the Beltway who are paid six figures to carp and whine and distract the government from its necessary work. It's sickening, but that's the price of democracy. We all have the right to make our views known, no matter how stupid they are.

This seemingly ignoble tradition of whining and carping is, believe it or not, one of the main reasons big earthquakes don't kill as many people in functioning democracies as they do in places like Haiti. Do you know why building codes in California and Japan are strict enough to ensure that buildings can withstand major (though not catastrophic) quakes? Because people complained and the government listened. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. This is also the reason famines don't happen in democracies. Famines involve not just crop failure but also government indifference. And a functioning democracy can't afford to be indifferent. This last bit is a thumbnail sketch of a thesis by Amyarta Sen. He won the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, largely for his work in this area.

Democracy isn't pretty, and it never works perfectly. But even when a democratic government would prefer to be indifferent to the suffering of its citizens (the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is a fair example), the populace will rise up and make the government act. The people may be unruly, but they do ensure a more perfect rule.

I don't know how to impose democracy on a nation. We're tried repeatedly--with a myriad of methods--and nothing seems to work. Apparently, the only way for democracy to truly flourish in a nation is for the people of that nation to work it out for themselves, with as little foreign interference as possible.

Of course, none of this abstract thought helps the people of Haiti today. While their dire situation is largely the result of incompetent (if not outright hostile) government, they need our help. Right now, we need to do what we're doing: Attempting to make the country safe and get as much food out as possible. Once the nation stabilizes (perhaps I ought to say "if," but I prefer to be an optimist), then we can let the people of Haiti come together and work out their own future. I wish them a future of excessive carping and whining, in the best democratic tradition.

Jon Worley votes regularly, if not necessarily effectively.