Haitian nightmare

There could not be a worse place for a 7.0 earthquake to hit than Haiti. This is a very difficult place to live in terms of infrastructure on a good day, much less after a powerful earthquake. Many of these people have nothing and the government infrastructure is almost non-existent. I thought yesterday of how much stress and suffering 14 inches of snow brought to Oklahoma City on Christmas Eve...of how many people commented on the slow speed of emergency response and government reaction. Yet you would have to multiply this a thousand fold to even approximate the environment in Haiti. We simply cannot imagine it, nor do we want to.

And the worst part is that there is truly little a person like me can do other than donate. So I have and yet that seems woefully inadequate. So then I pray - but what do I pray for? Do I pray for food and water and some end to the immediate suffering of those who have survived? Do I pray for the shattered hearts of all of those people who have lost those most important to them? Do I pray for more reasonable government in Haiti or and end to economic blight which keeps them down? There's only so long that you can rescue drowning people from the river before you wondering who keeps throwing them in there in the first place.

In this week we mark the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr...the man who reminded us that we are caught in a web of mutuality and that whatever happens to one of us happens to all of us. In this week we should remember his words as we look to Haiti, the forgotten place.

This is a quote from Tracy Kidder in the NYT: "Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In more recent years American administrations fell into a pattern of promoting and then undermining Haitian constitutional democracy.)"

In light of the ever sensitive Pat Robertson's comments, and the anniversary of Dr. King's birth, I want to go on record as saying (as if there were any doubt) that I'm on Dr. King's side. I don't know who this God is that Robertson talks about, but I do know the God that King told us of - a God who's heart was one of justice and compassion and who asked the same of us.

Dr. King once said, in perhaps his most controversial speech given at Riverside Church in New York City in which he spoke out against the Vietnam War, that "I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

This is time again. There is no better example for us that we are materially-driven not people-driven than Haiti. May God turn our hearts...

Please give if you can.