My thoughts on Haiti

A close look inside at the now, that desperately magical instant before us in a flash of light.

I was up early enough yesterday not to be so speechless. The mistake to some or conclusion to me that I made was before cutting and pasting my prearranged nothing I went to the World section of the New York Times and made several clicks deep off of the second page to find a video blog that had been posted from Haiti while I slept earlier in the night. The movement sickened me to the point of remote sadness that is not so easy to instantly pull back without thinking about it. I saw weight of structure heavy on the ground and the heart of a culture that before the earthquake was not living the 'dream' that I am. For the sake of reference when our bottom dropped out of the economy or better yet the fear of the Wall Street good boy rules so did the status of every Haitian times three. That's right. In late 08 when the Bujahideen and all of its confused wanna be followers took the Congress approved bail out, the humans by fault of birth living in Haiti went from paying .63cents for a cup of rice to .63cents for a third of a cup of rice. To begin with .63cents is all that they can afford. I have my sources, 50% of the Haitian population lives on less than a single US Dollar every day or 24 hours of One In God We Trust Unit. Their Trust in God goes much further than mine and those surrounding me ever gave consideration to.

To make up for that 2/3rds of a cup rice deficit the Haitian people, pregnant women, children and elderly often mix in sand and/or dirt into the grain as a supplement. National Geographic confused me one morning early in 09 when my visual cortex, hippocampus and brain scanned an image in print of a pregnant woman squatting with her long dress hiked up to her thighs while in the manual act of creating 'clay' pancakes. Clay Pancakes as fooding nutrition for her and the rest of the pregnant mothers while at that exact same second in time 750 miles away in West Palm Beach the oblivious Toon folk were Tooning it up and throwing away 1,500lbs of food an hour within the Toon City Limits. I thought about that then and I am reminded about it in this now as Fairfax County Virginia Search and Rescue went to work yesterday outside the Airport at the UN Building and the City Bank Building. Apparently the search and rescue efforts are sticking to the code of negotiating priorities for there are areas that no one will get the true immediate heroic response that I am fooled into believing is actually possible by the compounded wills of strong intelligent humans honest enough to face it side by side without fear. A hundred Million, that's a joke because I can only count to 3,945.

What is stopping 5 or 7 or 9.5 million Haitians from telling us to fuck off as we arrive with our answers stacking up in the relative safety of the Airport Compound? I mean up until right now, we have been okay with their suffering as a result of all that we have bought, sold and thrown away through this now which is directly connected to the Situation in Haiti. It is not as if I can count on the elusive perception that 'this' all has been happening for ever so, 'What can I do about it other than actively choose to not think about it and toon it up'. That may work for the majority of my American Culture but it does not for me. This is not the past, it is now.

As I went through my work day Wednesday, the day after hell on earth became not a dream in Haiti I watched the shiny transfer gleam all around me. Calls for lunches without consideration of the 'reality' so close by versus the job that must be done now because Haiti is so far away. At some point I realized that I feel alone or in a slim minority by considering the plight of others that is so closely connected to how great I have it.

In the film a mother had her two younger than mine kids by a hand each walking fast along the crowded narrow dirt road with throngs of disorientated Haitians moving about. The mother saw the dead just as the children in her hands gave her the energy transfer response of recognition and fear tied in a knot. The older of the two kids looked away, the mother hurried her pace and forced the little one through the gauntlet of human desperation even though they had already received it for life.