The catastrophe in Haiti is one that ought to challenge multiple cherished assumptions, but instead it is just providing us with a venue to put them all on display yet again.
I have been to Port au Prince once, when I was in the Navy, and the abject poverty there, when everything was “okay,” was astounding. Now, with this earthquake and the collapse of civil order, and a death toll that may get to 200,000, what should we do?
Now of course, on the sort of logistical expertise that is necessary in the days following a natural disaster like this, I have nothing to say. Just get out of the way and let the folks who know what they are doing get after it. Our responsibility is to provide them with the wherewithal. The authors of When Helping Hurts point out that in the immediate aftermath of this kind of thing, the spontaneous desire to help is natural and God-given. Christians should help, and they should help agencies with a proven track record of not making things worse. The word outpouring should come to mind. But it could be the biggest outpouring in the history of disaster relief, and twenty years from now, Haiti will be right where it was the day before the earthquake — and the day before the next one.
So I am asking about the larger issues, the long range issues. The US military is currently providing a lot of the help in this rescue operation, and the French have raised the specter of “occupation.” I am asserting nothing here, but am simply raising the question. It seems to me that if we were to follow N.T. Wright’s teaching that the parable of the Good Samaritan needs to be applied to international relations, this would appear to require occupation, establishing Haiti as a territory, and providing the law and structure that would allow a decent existence to develop for the people there. We might say no to this task for other reasons, but we really ought to know what we are saying no to. The thing we really have to stop doing is living in our Panglossian pipe dreams.
We are so governed by our heebie jeebies about colonialism, and so in love with the ideal of self-determination, that we can have our spokesmen stand on top of a pile of rubble that was scarcely a country back when it was not a pile of rubble, and solemnly intone the bromides that they learned back in their political science catechism class.
We have surgeons coming out of the operating room to give us a report every two hours, and the reporters listen attentively, which is strange, because the patient died three weeks ago.