The Lesson Learned to Be Learned?

Is it deliberate?

The continuing mess being made of the Haitian Earthquake Relief effort does give rise to the question of whether the aid agencies are deliberately slowing and refusing adequate levels of aid to the people. My post yesterday about the decision by the Big Aid Agencies that the Haitians will not receive tents as temporary shelter but that at best households in Port-Au-Prince will receive one 12X18 tarp -- if they are lucky, before the rainy season arrives -- just adds to the overall despair at the continuing nightmare there. Of course many of the decisions the Bigs have been making during the catastrophe and the aftermath, from the restrictions on food and water aid to the precipitous removal of rescue teams, to the overweening interest in "security" above all, point to policy decisions that should give us all pause.

As I said in an earlier post, "We are all Haitians now." If these things are not deliberate policy decisions but are merely accidents attributable to the scale and scope of the disaster, then we have another realization staring us in the face:

No government or agency or coalition or consortium of them anywhere in the world is even remotely prepared for or capable of handling emergency response and continuing aid on behalf of survivors of a serious mass-casualty disaster of any kind. They simply can't do it.

It's not, apparently, for lack of will on the part of individuals, either. It seems to be a massive and global institutional failure -- or collective decision to fail -- that cannot be addressed solely by individuals attempting to do their best under the circumstances.

In the case of Haiti, for example, there is an abundance of aid supplies but there has been a deliberate withholding of distribution, with every imaginable excuse offered, from the lack of cleared roads (though the Native survivors were able to get around pretty well, despite conditions) to the supposed lack of security. The Haitians organized themselves into survivor communities, chose their own community leaders and spokespeople, and the aid agencies refused to speak with them, refused to coordinate with them, and refused to deliver aid supplies to these communities. That had to have been a policy decision at the top of the aid agency hierarchy, and one can see why it might occur, even in the face of such grotesque suffering, because of the overriding desire to legitimate and prop up the nearly non-existent and non-functional Preval government through which the World Community (such as it is) has decided to work, a government installed by force on the Haitian people by that same World Community when the popular leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown -- again -- by the Bush White House. Thus, even if thousands or hundreds of thousands, or ultimately millions of Haitians suffer needlessly, at least the tottering (and imposed) "government" has been propped up, and that's the important thing.

Apparently it's the most important thing, the only truly important thing.

And the question is, how much longer will the People endure this radicalism at the top?

From appearances, it's gonna be a lot longer.