Grace

you can't go home again

2010-01-31T22:51:00.000-08:00

but i am trying.

turns the stomach

2010-01-22T18:01:00.000-08:00

When the media is the disaster
In the wake of the Haiti earthquake, false depictions of victims as criminals hinder the relief effort
BY REBECCA SOLNIT
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

AP /Gerald Herbert and Ramon Espinosa
Left: Haitian children line up to receive food at a food distribution site. Right: A woman defends herself as others try to take a bag she carried out of a damaged building in Port-au-Prince on Thursday.
Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I'm talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I'm talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word "looting." One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: "A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk." The man's sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: "Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince." It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: "A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store." Yet another: "The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter."

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who'd survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn't arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual "objective" roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The "looter" in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn't the most urgent problem. The "looter" stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don't convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I've seen I'm not convinced.

What Would You Do?

Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.

By day three, you're pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.

So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn't likely to be anywhere near enough aid any time soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply's long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don't think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.

The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they're people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven't shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn't mean anything now.

If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?

Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?

It's pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn't obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.

If Words Could Kill

We need to banish the word "looting" from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.

"Loot," the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out "At one time loot was the soldier's pay." It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers' pockets and as imperial seizures.

After years of interviewing survivors of disasters and reading firsthand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don't believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn't even call that theft.

Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it's usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don't need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word "panic" wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of "stampedes." Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it "security" -- rather than relief. A British-accented voice-over on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery "risks sparking chaos." The chaos already exists, and you can't blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they're unworthy and untrustworthy.

Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti's dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they've never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that's theft, but I'm not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.

In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it's not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.

A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I've heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.

A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.

Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services -- like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina -- to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn't label that looting.

Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing ... Well, you catch my drift.

Woody Guthrie once sang that "some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen." The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don't end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected -- or appointed -- office.

Learning to See in Crises

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: "The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one."

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn't help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it's bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England's green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be "violence," or "looting," or "law-breaking." It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don't have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I'd like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let's start with the picture of the policeman hog-tying the figure whose face is so anguished: "Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti's starving millions."

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? "As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti."

For the murdered policeman: "Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings."

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: "Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world."

That one might not be totally accurate, but it's likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

Orphans

2010-01-19T12:39:00.000-08:00

it seems strange that only weeks ago there was one man's pain on my mind and now there is a whole island's.

Filled with orphans before quake, Haiti likely to have thousands more after latest disaster
By Tamara Lush (CP) – 6 hours ago
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The 5-month-old patient at the Israeli field hospital has a number rather than a name.
No one even knows who dropped the barely conscious child at the makeshift medical centre after he was pulled from the debris of a collapsed building four days after last week's catastrophic quake. Now recovering, doctors have a difficult decision ahead.
"What will we do with him when we are finished?" said Dr. Assa Amit of the hospital's pediatric emergency department.
No one knows who the boy's family is, or whether any of his relatives are alive.
Tens of thousands of children have been orphaned by the earthquake, aid groups say - so many that officials won't venture a number. With so many buildings destroyed and growing chaos in the capital, it is conceivable that many children are alone.
"As yet they are still on the streets," said Elizabeth Rodgers, of the Britain-based international orphan group SOS Children. "Without doubt, most of them are in the open."
Even before Tuesday's deadly magnitude-7.0 earthquake, Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries, was awash in orphans, with 380,000 children living in orphanages or group homes, the United Nations Children's Fund reported on its Web site.
Some of the children lost their parents in previous disasters, including four tropical storms or hurricanes that killed about 800 people in 2008, deadly storms in 2005 and 2004, and massive floods almost every other year since 2000. Others were abandoned amid the Caribbean nation's long-running political strife, which has led thousands to seek asylum in the U.S. - without their children - or by parents who were simply too poor to care for them.
International advocacy groups are trying to help, either by speeding up adoptions that were already in progress, or by sending in relief personnel who could potentially evacuate thousands of orphans to the U.S. and other countries.
On Tuesday, a flight carrying 53 Haitian orphans landed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after two sisters working at a Haitian orphanage used Twitter and Facebook to spread the word about their plight.
A day earlier, the Dutch government sent a planeload of immigration officials to Haiti who will try to locate and evacuate 100 children who were already being adopted by Dutch parents.
Also Monday, Indiana-based Kids Alive International, which runs orphanages around the world, is expected to take 50 Haitian orphans to group homes in the Dominican Republic, the organization said in a news release.
U.S. Homeland Security spokesman Sean Smith said Monday that orphans who have ties to the U.S. - such as a family member already living here - are among those who can get special permission to remain in the United States.
Notwithstanding the U.S. policy, the Catholic Church in Miami is working on a proposal that would allow thousands of orphaned children to come permanently to America. A similar effort launched in 1960, known as Operation Pedro Pan, brought about 14,000 unaccompanied children from Cuba to the U.S.
Under the new plan, dubbed "Pierre Pan," Haitian orphans would first be placed in group homes and then paired with foster parents, said Mary Ross Agosta, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Miami.
"We have children who are homeless and possibly without parents and it is the moral and humane thing to do," Agosta said.
Archdiocese officials said many details would have to be worked out and President Barack Obama's administration would have to grant orphans humanitarian parole to enter the U.S.
In the meantime, U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said the United Nations is establishing a group whose mission on the ground in Haiti will be to protect children - orphans and non-orphans alike - against trafficking, kidnapping and sex abuse.
And orphanages that were operating in Haiti before the earthquake are scrambling to keep their kids safe, sheltered and fed. Those with damaged buildings are pledging to rebuild and take in more children, if needed.
Three of the four orphanages operated in Port-au-Prince by Planting Peace, a Melbourne, Fla., non-profit, have been damaged, forcing staff to move everyone into one building. They are now trying to secure homes in Haiti for the kids, the group's founder, Aaron Jackson, told The Associated Press in an email. Rainn Wilson, who appears in the TV show "The Office," is raising money for the group, Jackson said.
Jackson said all 37 of his orphans are physically fine and he would like to help more children.
"There needs to be some communication from the government level about what we need to do. Can we take these children?" he said. "We're ready. We've already raised a fair amount of money where we can go out and get an orphanage running soon."
Sherrie Fausey had to evacuate 30 children from her Christian Light Foundation orphanage in the capital after her facility was badly damaged in the quake.
Fausey, a former Florida elementary school teacher who came to Haiti 10 years ago, acknowledges that her job - daunting before the quake - has become even more challenging now.
"Wherever the Lord sends you, he'll make you content to be there," she said. "Times can be hard, but I'd rather be here in all this rubble. It's where my kids are."
At the Israeli field hospital, doctors are expecting to treat many more orphans in the coming days.
On one of the hospital's stretchers, Patient No. 236, a 6-month-old boy, lay on a hospital stretcher, crying in pain. Relatives brought him to the medical centre shortly after the disaster, then left. They didn't tell anyone the boy's name.
Doctors suspect the infant had meningitis long before the earthquake - and they also suspect that no one is coming back for him.
"We will wait to discharge him until there is a facility that can grant continuous care," Amit said.
Associated Press Writers Curt Anderson and Matt Sedensky in Miami and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RYPXnBm-E8&feature=related

2010-01-12T08:03:00.000-08:00

I feel very sad about Artie Lange. While people may not understand it - the Stern show is actually really cool and honest. Makes waking up easier every day - and never fails to put a smile on my face. I have been listening off and on since the early 90s - and have been introduced to a lot of great comics because of it. Happy Birthday Howard.

To Better Days

2010-01-08T07:55:00.001-08:00

Be Well Artie Lange. You guys make joining the world in the morning a whole lot easier....

Just a moment....

2009-10-26T20:55:00.000-07:00

“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’”
-Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

On the Good Ship

2009-03-12T17:17:00.000-07:00

When the hurlyburly's done,

When the battles lost and won.

Grace

2009-03-11T21:09:00.001-07:00

for the Philly 3

Night after night

O, I have seen no malaise

Turn on the good show

The offer stands

Always the choice

Inferno or Purgatorio

The offer to renovate / Broke from form

The body is safe / All courage and veins

Pluck out and string

Your teeth a cross

Bring a bite down

Where all this light sucks

The offer stands

Hither old times

The true meal

Take what you will between drinks

John stoned Henry

Bombs have no home

Thank God It Is Friday

2009-02-27T17:14:00.000-08:00

...!

The play is the thing

I got to get to my baby

Just got to get to

Leave uncut the phrases

Know how wide a river can be

Got to get to

The beauties on the beach

Appear like mice

Kneeling.......

This world

For thee

My dogs

He kin play

My Limits

He kin play

I bend on Mother's prayers

My God he can play!

These private wrongs

The beauties weep

Your grace alone

Trust Me

2009-02-20T10:35:00.000-08:00

A person is an accessory

Love a colonized act

A reaction of the tongue to taste

Music that confused

A universal sine qua non

That prayer answers prayer

Lighting on a golden pea

There is hope in the hills

And messages in the smoke rings

If poetry was reading

We would all suffer loss

The pantheon of the manageable

The heart is it's own

Rhetorical indictment

The birds hit the treble

When caught

And forced to play the swan

Anyone will sing like a canary

Love I

2009-02-17T05:55:00.000-08:00

Tears show their love but want their remedies

Site of desire

Of tentative questions

Work to live by

Wax heart and blossom

Gray as a melting town

Old as the myth of land

Like walking in one's sleep

And the biological imperative to captivity

Rinsed fresh with true-love's tears

A quality nearer to mercy

Song

2009-02-11T13:02:00.000-08:00

Scallop of quiet Clear light

As far as shyness

I tend to you

A time of labour

A shaft of faith

Stripe of joy Sea-side love

Grown of glory

Grace’s gage

A Good Time

2009-02-09T20:17:00.000-08:00

Call the messenger

Bring in the letters

Round up the animals

The show begins

The clown tickles

The verse is halting

Good as grace

Grace that translates

Misfortune into epitaph

Don't try

The best is yet to come

No more Heroes

Pray for a place

Writ in water

Where no prayers can pierce

At the bottom of a glass

Where everybody loves

Somebody sometime

2009-02-05T19:59:00.000-08:00

Night full of dainty dishes

The high wire act hangs from thread

Folly gazes

A Charioteer in red

Whip static, horses metal

The clowns too thin

The dog made from cork

One wants to repair the world

Make things move

Then what?

A couple of whistling Pierrots

Intellect without faith

It is always in the best interest

To have the run-of-the-mill

Recital

2009-01-29T18:30:00.000-08:00

Suppose the singing birds musicians

Every word a measure

The paper flowers girls

Grief a light arabesque

Turned out at the bar

The last leave of thee

Takes my weeping eye

Sorrow is no more

Firsts

2009-01-23T19:43:00.001-08:00

for Dave and Shane

...sweets and beauties do themselves forsake...

My first soda spoon

Change

2009-01-20T20:42:00.000-08:00

First

A closed and profane world

Later

A tender shame

Finally

Melts the frozen air

Reclaims

Its rightful place

Not as possessor

But as the desire of everyone

Work

2009-01-18T20:19:00.000-08:00

remains

Homeland

2009-01-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

"To kill or to die is to seek an exit from being, to go where freedom and negation operate. Horror is the event of being which returns within the bowels of this negation, as though nothing has moved." (Emanuel Levinas, from Il y a)

O to smash in soft heads/ Of birds/ Capped in Orange /Reds

Hardly worth the rendering sounds

Delimits as it multiplies / Stabilizes as it suffuses

Sleet rips the sycamore figs / From their mulberry branches

In the face of relentless rejection / No one is refused

Love

2009-01-13T21:13:00.000-08:00

Love is confused with its interval

As is time

But in love, in time

Indefinitely hollowed

Indefinitely stretched

Proximity is always a dispossession

There are numbers one must never utter

Impossibly, we are each the other's

Merit

2009-01-12T20:37:00.000-08:00

Will reward every man according to his works: to those who by perseverance in working good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. There will be . . . glory and honor and peace for every one who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality" (Rom. 2:6–11)

With one eye closed to heaven
Let one become marred
In the transmission

As vital as it is necessary
That there be grace ceded
To this thin life

I throw my hat in
With the worst

being tender raw and young
Which elder days shall ripen and confirm
To more approved service and desert

Outside

2009-01-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

snow day

Saturday Night: For Jaye and Shane

2009-01-10T14:26:00.000-08:00

Graceless

The touch

Same advice:

Quit riding the clutch

And while you're ahead

Draw a map

God does not trace your suffering...

This your first Rodeo, son?

Firsts

2009-01-08T09:51:00.000-08:00

My first position as a

MONKEY ON YOUR BACK

For Eli and Shane

2009-01-06T09:56:00.000-08:00

Grace

Heat shaped to blunt
The heads of fruit

In Buffalo
We have no ramparts
To stalk

Nor room
For our heavy air
Of prison talk

Old John
Hither Henry

Left Father, Mother
Grace, was born in
the Book

Old John
Who said that milk is full of Angels
Henry, we have but few days

Grace is not a "poison", as I once said
A weight upon
One’s air

Pardon all oaths
Pardon all friends

If one were suddenly
To take to heart
An impartial heart

If a kiss can stop
Our mouth

Put it in the physician’s mind
Only to help us
To our grave