Haiti continues: Fuck you edition

So now there's an absurd rationalization that Haiti did not give us money to help with Katrina or 9-11 so we shouldn't have to help them. I'm going to take a rather unorthodox step (for me) of quoting the Bible. This should give people a pretty good idea how pissed off this makes me. The rage is sufficient to make it impossible to concentrate reliably without deflecting it through some scriptural analogy that people might have heard of rather than one of my own. It's making me angrier just thinking about it being even made and that I have to respond to such inhumane and insufferable attitudes.

"And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much. And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing. And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury: For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living."

Haiti, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in fact contributed around $36,000 in total aid money to the American relief effort (among the hundreds of nations who did so, many with vast resources contributed far "less" in terms of GDP ratios, and many more pledges of aid were turned aside, for various reasons. For example Cuba's offer of medical assistance was turned away, for what must be seen as obvious reasons given our icy relationship). Given the billions of aid pouring in now to help the suffering of its people now (and the billions more given over the last two hundred years to aid with hurricane relief and crushing poverty), that is a drop in the bucket yes. But to expect any more would be as one who expects an ant to help with carrying his groceries inside.

What resources would we have expected Haiti's government and people to possess that we lacked for need of in the wake of that tragedy and others? We have the largest military and the largest economy in the world. This gives us the luxury to help others in their time of need through private donations and public aid given through the state department or through the assistance of military and corporate equipment and, if the lengthy number of tokens of aid that flowed in in the wake of Katrina are any good indicator, this is in fact something that Americans are well respected for around the world because many nations sought to return the favor in our own hour of need. Haiti meanwhile is one of the poorest countries in the world (and the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, even the commies in Havana are way better off) with a dysfunctional nation-state even under the best of circumstances. Despite this, it still took the time to express a token of esteem and gratitude with money that it could most certainly use for its own people (even if it is unclear that it would have done so). And we have the conceit to want to tell them to fuck off now because "they didn't help us?"

The logic of only helping nations who helped us, incidentally, would probably include some places I very seriously doubt we would "want" to help. Like Chavez ruled Venezuela, which contributed discounted oil and natural gas reserves to our refugees through its state-owned oil company.

Anyway, as bad as the destruction on the Gulf Coast was, the amount of human toll it took was no where near what we're seeing here (and a few years ago in Indonesia). Yes some thousands of people died and their homes were displaced. Property can be rebuilt or people can just move on and live somewhere else to escape the dangers they experienced in the wake of a natural disaster of tremendous scale. Human beings cannot do such a basic thing as "move on" if they are dead or must grieve for unaccounted-for loved ones. If there are hundreds of thousands dead, imagine a metropolis sized American city vanishing from the map nearby with nearly all its inhabitants killed or seriously injured or knowing someone who was, and then translate that to a place that did not have nearby adequate medical facilities in the first place prior to the calamity nor well-established police and military forces to keep order and distribute supplies to survivors. That is not Katrina, as bad as that was and as destructive to New Orleans and elsewhere as it was. It is an unprecedented disaster in American history. We've never seen anything like it in modern history anywhere in the globe. The casualties and vast scale of devastation after the tsunami in 2004 are similar yes. But Indonesia and India and Thailand had institutional structures still in place, their governments did not implode, their people were, for the most part, not already existing in desperate poverty, and the international community responded freely to assist in any ways that it might. To suggest that the most powerful agent in that community should not react at all and more over, should not solely out of some petty self-regard for its own disasters in the semi-recent past for which it was largely capable of handling on its own, if in a historically bumbling way, is so beyond any reckoning of how any self-respecting human being should regard the suffering of others as to be despicable and even deserving of our loathing. There are arguments as to why the nation-state powers of the American union should not be deployed to Haiti. I do not personally agree with them or, at least, they're not applicable to the current legal interpretations of the powers and capacities of our government (for example appeals to Constitutional mandates regarding foreign aid), but they are infinitely less petty and far more legitimate than this.

It is true that a magnitude 7 earthquake is actually very modest (as far as serious earthquakes go). Well-run nation states do not typically lose entire cities and hundreds of thousands of lives when they occur, nor do their existing political and social institutions crumble and cease to function. This is admittedly a problem with the Haitian situation that requires some attention, and it is an attention that we will have tremendous difficulty resolving. It resembles very much the problems we have experienced in Afghanistan and Somalia before that. A region with minimal effective governance in its entire history is not going to turn into a "model UN democracy" or perhaps even a benevolent tyranny overnight. I've already put forward the best idea I can for helping with that in the short-to-medium term: move the Haitians who want to move to someplace else, most likely somewhere in America since the global demand to come to America is still very strong and undoubtedly the regional demand of Haitians is even higher still than some random family in sub-Saharan Africa would feel compelled to express. Individuals and immigrants are far more likely to adapt to a system of governance that has proven modestly effective over time than are other nation-states and foreign interventions/aid likely to spontaneously provide such governance to them in their current homes (multiplied in difficulty further still by the fact that most people will not even have current homes for some time).

And other than that, still seems pretty much like giving what you can, if you want to, while allowing the US government (and others) to proceed to help as well in the immediate term is the only alternative. Any argument that they did not help us so we should not bother with helping them is absurd and deserves to be openly mocked as immaterial and asinine. For a country that is supposedly founded on something like Christian morals (whatever those are and according to Christians anyway), we often look a lot more like a country that is founded on something like the morals of a 5 year old petulant child to me.