Only months after forgotten disaster: Haiti

I.

It seems it must be more time. It is mere months after their disaster: Haitians deserve not to be forgotten by the world. But an excuse is not for any nation or individual to give: Why have all our efforts efforts have not done enough for Haiti? We are all responsible. There is no excuse left for any one of us: We are all responsible to act.

What have we done to change the suffering of Haitians? What do we know how to do?

Our efforts for Haiti are for our whole humanity. What we do for the least among us reflects on our entire human ethic: frail, incomplete, resolute, impossible, merciful, self-interested.

Even our poorest nations (maybe more importantly our poorest nations) should be treated with equality, respect and dignity as our world finally decides once and for certain if we are all to be judged together: integral, decent, connected, dependent by standards of international solidarity.

The case of Haiti's disaster was a result of legacies of colonialism and geographic centralization by monopolies of capitalism and military industrial complex. Our response and quorums to restore nature and humanity for Haiti matched the call for equity in the rebuilding of our City of New Orleans healthfully, holistically, with an engaged and empowered population of democratically governed five years previously. Haiti gives us a positive reason to reevaluate strategies and opportunities for implementation of more humanistic and scientific responses to disaster: the standards which we mete out in Haiti really are our minimum respect for our humanity.

II.

Disaster is an opportunity which can benefit corporations, government, people, and/or the environment. It is past time we began treating it as such. While on the one hand Naomi Klein and Naomi Zack both painted true portraits of the political and corporate backing for philosophies of planned responses to disaster (which, incidentally, got the USA into our current roles on the Gulf Coast, after Haiti, or in Afghanistan/Iraq theaters of war).

Taken positively, there is are some possible positive interpretations of the quality of world reaction to disaster which says that disaster offers us the chance to see our common self interests, how they are connected, and ACT.

In her analysis of Disaster Capitalism Klein points correctly to the ways governments have behaved and used disaster to push through unpopular economic plans. This news, taken together with the consistent failure to establish recent protocols and new global conferences and it may be fair to argue that we have come away with little results from the pressing changes of our climate.

However, the world has a consciousness dilemma which can potentially be an arbiter of change using the same terms described by Klein and Zack. If communities are organized for participation, engagement, and, as possible, for local controls and decision-making, disasters (whether they occur to us or effect us from around the globe) may be arbiters of good sense and positive actions. [The same agent of change used for enormous economic and political change can become an agent for local change, local governance, and/or change of personal or communal responsibility.]

The nations are still not together; (Copenhagen 2009), it is still obvious that any of our recent disasters point to unwillingness, either by our planetary orb or its people, to any longer accept either individually self-interested motivation of nations; or, world's unrelenting environmental changes that demand new actions and world multinational endeavors be cooperative.

III.

What we are doing from where we are today and on our trip? What do we know that we can share with Haitians? What are the actions we know of now which make positive changes occur?

Raising awareness...acting constantly
Supporting local actions, dignity, and participation-based engagement of communities
Acting to reduce global inequity
Acting to reduce environmental degradation
Purchasing fair trade products
Support macroeconomic benefits for human restoration in disaster
Shrinking our carbon footprint
Blogging about our Actions (for Haiti)
Supporting businesses that benefit poor countries economies

We want to continue discussing disasters, how they happen, how they are mitigated, how to prevent them, how to use them for good.

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Tragic Earthquake Shakes the World: Thoughts from China

For the last two days we have been rocked with the tragic news from
Haiti. Of course, we want to be home tending to the hurt and loss in
our dear Caribbean. The people of Haiti have suffered so much; they
are the last ones who need to experience more disaster.

Images here are horrible. Our prayers and work will shift to digging
out more information from Sichuan Earthquake in China to try and give
some comfort and aid to our Haitian compatriots and those who work
feverishly these next weeks and months and years to support them.

When disaster of such magnitude strikes, it is impossible to
understand. In the case of communities as impoverished, as damaged by
generations of corrupt governments, and with poor education, class
discrimination, and underdevelopment, suffering is more acute, more
palpable.

In China, a central government responded with massive convoys of
assistance, full military resource, and direct oversight by the most
powerful decision-makers the country had. Every province took on very
specific and targeted roles in assuring rapid deployment of aid and
community specific redevelopment activity.

As was our experience on the Gulf Coast of the USA after Katrina, and,
as is likely to be the case with Haiti, there is an absence of local
and national comprehensive response strategies. Worse, the human
restoration approach will not be put in place due, at least in part,
to: (1) competition over limited resources not to be delivered en
masse for humanitarian relief; (2) prioritization of government and
corporate toward infrastructure and other big projects; (3) a 'gold
rush' of grafters, contractors, and top heavy NGO-bloated
bureaucracies, (4) lack of existing community-based planning or plans,
(5) resistance to community engagement or historical analysis of
community needs and existing asset maps.

If the world community could seriously endeavor to combine elements
from the rapidly centralized recovery in Sichuan, China, with the
urban practices and democratic engagement principles developed but not
fully implemented following Katrina, Kobe, 2004 Tsunami or other
disasters, Haiti would likely recover faster, healthier, sustainably,
and democratically. The rush to pull injured, dead and dying from the
heaps of Port-au-Prince's hellish collapse will most likely be
followed by a rush to exploit resources and manage communities towards
increased marginalization, displacement, and disenfranchisement of
impoverished masses. Monopolization of power, corruption of class
structures, expanding political oligarchical powers, and resource
deprivation will likely force more suffering on Haiti, her neighbors,
her supporters, and the world-community at large. Looked at in this
way, the urgency should be upon all of us to urge a disaster recovery
for Haiti which transmutes new standards of cultural resiliency,
humanitarian environmentalism, economic sustainability, healthful
democratization through community engagement, and participatory,
inclusive, and equitable planning.

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