Haiti 2010

Heartfelt grief to our brothers and sisters who’ve lost loved ones in the Haitian earthquake. No words can compensate their suffering. This disaster is so crushing because the island has no economic slack or surplus to cope with it. What’s more, the world’s reaction (requiring a full week for a proper response) demands systematic improvement. New Orleans: F; Indian Ocean Tsunami: D; Haiti: C-; your hometown: ?

Those are our failings, for us to redeem. We can guess what Martin Luther King would have said about this, on this his holiday. “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.”

Haiti has been a blot on the American Soul: the throbbing canker sore of our syphilitic inheritance of New World slavery. We should lance that boil and heal it. As usual, the least among us have suffered the most from it, past and present, and would offer the most promise in the future.

We must allow Haitians to manufacture this economic surplus. Unfortunately, bogus WeaponWorld requirements reduce to nothing the real needs of those survivors. They may be provided with emergency rations, water and gunpoint security in the short term, but left to their fate in the long run -- so much human waste to be exploited or ignored.

On PeaceWorld, our reaction to the Haitian disaster would be self-evident. Once we had met immediate needs, vast investments in infrastructure would generate economic self-sufficiency once and for all.

The following local industries need to be financed: construction, tourism, piecework clothing for export, and agricultural self-sufficiency (the first elements of any healthy economy). Along with these, communication and education infrastructures and ecological restoration throughout the island, virtually from scratch. Once they have been properly financed, Haiti may regrow into its natural place in the global scheme. NGOs on the ground know exactly what is needed, and must be consulted. Everywhere and under all circumstances, native leaders must be responsible for local development, and natives, hired to construct it.

This is the best we could offer to such poor folk so long subjected to economic servitude and enforced misery. We owe it to ourselves to restore their full potential. There would be nothing but gain in this, as much for us and for them. It would not be passing charity but the ultimate justice. And from it we could forecast unexpected benefits, as against the injustice that has disgraced, injured and ruined, out of the blue, all involved.