Where is the World? Jeanne: Compare Florida to Haiti
by Alan Farago
…Hurricane Jeanne hit Haiti hard before it did that loop the loop and aimed right where Frances had gone before. The double blow bent the knees of the most hardened residents of Florida’s Treasure Coast, already weakened by calamitous, toxic outflows from Lake Okeechobee.
The death toll in Haiti, first reported at 500, quickly mounted to more than 1,000 and is likely to double. More than 250,000 are homeless. The storm hit in the middle of the night in Gonaives, where most deaths occurred, without forewarning — no Weather Channel, no TV reporters with goggles leaning into the blistering wind.
When a hurricane aims for the United States, millions of people mobilize in synchronicity. The storm’s passing sets the stage for federal emergency managers, power crews clearing trees fallen from roads or on roofs, transformers shipped by the bushel in flatbed trailers, plywood stacked in perfect bundles, gasoline stations resupplied and rallying the troops.
Every response of our government to disaster reinforces the large-scale systems that provide comfort to people who can afford them, even when the viability of those systems is shaken by the power of nature.
But in Haiti — the poorest place in our hemisphere — every disaster only reinforces the vacuum of power and absence of organization to protect people from survival of the fittest.
…Our own comforts obscure how difficult it is to rearrange poverty that people experience as a humiliating stigma they did nothing to deserve. And although we seem to recognize that in a world of globalization we are not an island unto ourselves, too often our relations with the undeveloped world are poisoned by the attitude that if they would just learn to do business like we do, or if they can’t, let us do business for them, then everything would be swell.
It is discouraging on a website that claims to challenge the status quo to see an article like this. What are the historical roots of this “poverty that people experience”? It’s not about US isolationism, being “an island unto ourselves,” but aggressive interventionism, in Haiti’s case for 200 years. Why doesn’t anybody want to talk about why poor countries are poor? About why over 200 people in Haiti last week were simply left to die? This article suggests that the US should be ashamed of its lack of charity. That is just obscene. It was President Aristide’s demand for reparations that caused 50 American marines to storm his palace this winter and remove him. Poor countries don’t need charity. They need justice.