Last night, after a nice dinner with friends, we ran into a mutual friend - a physician - who had just returned from Haiti. His stories were, well, depressing. Apparently no matter what we are seeing on TV, he said, the reality is 100 times worse.
Our friend expressed dismay at the complete ineptitude and callowness of the UN; he was shocked that when push came to shove the institution's own image - the perception that IT was in charge - trumped any silly concerns for actual human suffering. The UN, he said, made things worse - a lot worse - and he wished they would just leave.
I, of course, was not shocked at all. The UN, though a noble concept, needs to be scrapped in its entirety and reconstituted from scratch. I will never forgive Bush for not pushing this idea through. I mean, everybody hated him already. Why not do the politically unpopular thing and just shut it down?
My wife, who is the antithesis of me, wants to adopt every Haitian under the age of 5. She is that kind of person.
I am not. I pointed out that there has been similar carnage in Turkey, Mexico, Iran and a host of other nations. Millions have been slaughtered in Africa in the last 5 years. I just don't remember the outcry.
People are people; I do care about the people. But all this relief is a good and natural human response that really just does one thing: It makes us feel better about ourselves. We aren't really saving lives in the grand scheme of things; Haiti will still be a hellhole a year and probably even ten years from now, just like Africa.
Sorry to be so negative and fatalistic, but that's the reality. I am a Hobbesian - life is nasty, brutish and short. And with institutions like the UN around it's a little bit nastier and brutish.
If we really want to solve problems we need to spend less energy on the band-aid solutions that aren't solutions at all - they just make us feel better about ourselves - and start to focus on the things that create these problems in the first instance.
No, the UN didn't cause the earthquake, but natural disasters have been and will always be with us. We have no control whatsoever over these things. And we should help; I am not saying we should walk away or do nothing. But no one is really asking the important question: why is Haiti such a hellhole? Why did everything on the island collapse? Why is there no infrastructure? Why is there no soap (yup - our friend told us that there is no water and no soap, so fighting infection is a real challenge)?
These problems caused the earthquake to be much worse than it should have been.
And take a minute to google "Jimmy Carter" and "Haiti." I find it interesting, and personally somewhat rewarding, to note the close ties between Mr. Carter and most of the hellholes on earth. Coincidence? I think not. Take any hellhole, add a dash of Jimmy Carter, and over time everything gets much worse. As in "Gasoline?" "Meet Fire."
Enough. Now back to our regular programming.
No comments:
Post a Comment