rivervision

yes, i heard about the situation in haiti on tuesday afternoon.. i think i heard about it through twitter. like many, when i heard, i was horrified about the situation. it was being posted all over twitter and i was glad to see that people cared.

but it didn’t take too long for me to get angry about the reaction. why anger? i know, crazy reaction – anger when people care. i’m angry at the the haiti stuff, not because people are caring and not because people in haiti don’t need the help, but because – here’s the thing – these horrors in haiti, are happening all over the world, every day. i think about the siege on gaza and how the 1.5 million people there are struggling to simply live while israel enforces it and the US, egypt and the rest of the world just let it happen. and then darfur and sudan and how the genocide has been going on there for longer than any genocide should (a genocide shouldn’t ever go on, fwiw, but the world has known for a long time now and it is still happening). and colombia, east timor, afghanistan, ethiopia, pakistan, and haiti before the quake.. and i know the list could go on and on and on. and the same people i see twittering for haiti, most of those same people i have never ever seen comment about another country who’s people are living the same daily horrors that the people of haiti are living. yes, there are babies, children, young people and old people living out under the stars, not knowing where their next meal is coming from all over the world.. only the difference in non-natural disasters is that those people don’t know if help is ever going to come, if the world does care.

and it makes me angry – so suddenly there is a natural disaster and people care about different parts of the world? i actually posted yesterday “if americans cared half as much about gaza as they do about haiti then gaza would be free.” and what about the rest of the world where americans could use their power to stop daily horrors around the world, not just gaza or the west bank? it would be huge, and powerful, and truly a miracle. but with some situations – afghanistan, the west bank & gaza for instance – america would have to apologize because we either a) caused it and/ or b) support it with our tax dollars. and americans are not a group of people to apologize. and in other places americans would have to move from crisis – which we are so good at – to caring long enough to force the hand of the american government to demand that these genocides stop. yes, for places like the sudan & darfur, americans would have to force the government’s hand to do something, which will take all these people caring right now for haiti to care this much for a long period of time. but we didn’t cause the situation in sudan? we didn’t cause the situation in bosnia either and we sent military there, and iraq – cripes we started 2 wars in iraq and the same with afghanistan. when this country of mine wants something to happen it will go as far as to break international law to make it so.

but we’re not good at this. and as a group we won’t do this, because the advantage of crisis is that we can care for a few minutes and then go back to our lives. the advantage of crisis is that we can appear to be the good person to those in our networks and then go back to our lives without really doing anything to make a difference.

in a week america is going to not care as much, and we are going to go back to our normal situation as always, until the next natural disaster. and then we’ll care again for a week or so. and the cycle will continue until people in this country really wake up. maybe what is happening in sudan, gaza, colombia will have to happen here, to the white middle and upper class for people here to care for more than a week. that is incredibly sad that that is the case, but it probably is going to be. and after haiti is rebuilt there will still be people living under stars, not knowing where their next meal or drink of water is coming from, terrified about what may happen to them next and most americans will be happily in their little world convinced that what they did for haiti was heroic and now they don’t get to care anymore.