The unending hypocrisy and/or deliberate blindness of everyone involved in this whole Haiti relief effort is truly infuriating. While everyone is making a huge deal out of what big, damn heroes they are, no-one seems to be mentioning that it’s only due to centuries of oppression, neglect, and exploitation by us1 that they’re even in this position; so poor they can neither construct buildings that can stand up to the force of the earthquake2, nor have enough infrastructure in place to be able to recover.
I’m really getting incensed by all these people talking about how great we are for helping these poor Haitians in their hour of need—blithely ignoring the fact that their “hour of need” was decades ago.
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Where by “us”, I mean the so-called “first-world” countries in general and the United States and France in particular. ↩
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The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was also a magnitude 7.0 earthquake—it killed 63 people, because California has, you know, money to actually build solid buildings. ↩
