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That there are already reports of how people are "looting" for food. That's right, black people loot. White people "survive under difficult circumstances." It's really like Katrina all over again, except on a much grander, more terrible scale. The global scale of just how far the divide between the rich and the poor is.
That people tearfully ask "how could this happen to people who have suffered so much?" Smart people ask this--and the question ignores the structural injustices that underlie both the damage from the earthquake and the other forms of suffering that somehow make it cosmically unfair that there is an earthquake ON TOP of all that. These things are all related. The dire poverty and the lack of infrastructure are a legacy of colonialism and a consequence of global neocolonialism; so is the fact that the city was built to accommodate 50,000 people, before there was adequate knowledge about how to build cities in seismographically vulnerable zones--and then the same global economic processes that have created megacities and megaslums turned Port-au-Prince into an impoverished city of over a million people. And no one cares if infrastructure is inadequate in poor black cities. Not the building codes in Haiti, not the levees in New Orleans. (And this is not even talking about the millions of global impoverished who have to trade off land security for things like health and basic minimum environmental standards, and live on toxic dumps, in the paths of landslides, and on volcano slopes--because everywhere else they would be priced out or just kicked out). Pat Robertson is so retarded it doesn't even make me angry--I mean it's Pat fucking Robertson, what do you expect? He is a moron. What is more upsetting to me is how people close their eyes to the very real structural, historical and contemporary reasons for why it is the world's poor that pay the heaviest price for "acts of God."
That there is so much focus in American media on the handful of American students who are missing there, and on the handful of babies who were in the process of adoption and how will they get to the States now, or on the American missionaries and how they are having a hard time helping people? I understand that to some extent the focus will be on a nation's citizens, and I hope all the students are found, and the babies are airlifted, but Jesus Christ, this is not an American tragedy--the faces of these Lynn University students are all over the news, there are private rescue teams looking for them--how is it that they are singled out as victims for the spotlight, and as they are found, their rescue to the DR on helicopters is publicized--when there are no helicopters, no food, no water, nothing except cohabiation on the streets with decomposing corpses for thousands of people whom no one will ever help? Yes of course there are stories about the general state of things but as far as putting the faces on the tragedy--how are most of the faces white or somehow American-affiliated?
If you are still looking for a place to donate, I recommend Paul Farmer's organization, Partners In Health.
http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti
That people tearfully ask "how could this happen to people who have suffered so much?" Smart people ask this--and the question ignores the structural injustices that underlie both the damage from the earthquake and the other forms of suffering that somehow make it cosmically unfair that there is an earthquake ON TOP of all that. These things are all related. The dire poverty and the lack of infrastructure are a legacy of colonialism and a consequence of global neocolonialism; so is the fact that the city was built to accommodate 50,000 people, before there was adequate knowledge about how to build cities in seismographically vulnerable zones--and then the same global economic processes that have created megacities and megaslums turned Port-au-Prince into an impoverished city of over a million people. And no one cares if infrastructure is inadequate in poor black cities. Not the building codes in Haiti, not the levees in New Orleans. (And this is not even talking about the millions of global impoverished who have to trade off land security for things like health and basic minimum environmental standards, and live on toxic dumps, in the paths of landslides, and on volcano slopes--because everywhere else they would be priced out or just kicked out). Pat Robertson is so retarded it doesn't even make me angry--I mean it's Pat fucking Robertson, what do you expect? He is a moron. What is more upsetting to me is how people close their eyes to the very real structural, historical and contemporary reasons for why it is the world's poor that pay the heaviest price for "acts of God."
That there is so much focus in American media on the handful of American students who are missing there, and on the handful of babies who were in the process of adoption and how will they get to the States now, or on the American missionaries and how they are having a hard time helping people? I understand that to some extent the focus will be on a nation's citizens, and I hope all the students are found, and the babies are airlifted, but Jesus Christ, this is not an American tragedy--the faces of these Lynn University students are all over the news, there are private rescue teams looking for them--how is it that they are singled out as victims for the spotlight, and as they are found, their rescue to the DR on helicopters is publicized--when there are no helicopters, no food, no water, nothing except cohabiation on the streets with decomposing corpses for thousands of people whom no one will ever help? Yes of course there are stories about the general state of things but as far as putting the faces on the tragedy--how are most of the faces white or somehow American-affiliated?
If you are still looking for a place to donate, I recommend Paul Farmer's organization, Partners In Health.
http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti
