Coping with Sand Castles: More Thoughts on Haiti

The photo of the day - and maybe of the past week - is one of an 8-year-old Haitian boy emerging from the rubble, 8 days after the quake, arms outstretched in triumph and with a most gigantic smile on his face. He and his sister were both rescued alive, in relatively good condition, after 8 days without food and water. They're the biggest little miracles.

For every miracle that Haiti has seen over the past week, we all know there have been 1000 tragedies - probably quite literally. But the fact remains that there have been miracles, great and small, televised and not. TV and print journalists keep remarking on the resilience of the Haitian people - how they survive in wreckage, how they help each other, how they just sit and wait for a week for a bottle of water to show up. While Haitians certainly deserve tremendous praise and incite plenty of inspiration for living through what they have over the last week, I have to take issue with the growing theory that Haitians are somehow superhuman. Maybe this level of "resilience" isn't actually a good thing.

Maybe we should step back and think about WHY 99.9% of the city of Port-au-Prince is sitting patiently on its haunches - bleeding, famished, parched - waiting for relief. Maybe, just maybe, these people aren't simply of docile constitution. Maybe they don't know any better than to sit back and wait for help, or maybe, they're just used to the endless holding pattern of misery. They don't seem to be very assertive, and they certainly can't be blamed for their passivity considering Haiti's human rights history. Everyday life is certainly better than this, but not by leaps and bounds like it is in, say, the United States - or 191 other countries. These people ARE strong and they certainly do provide some lessons to those of us living in cushy comfort, but the roots of their strength are lamentable.

I've heard many talking heads say that Haiti may be the only country in the world that couldn't handle this. Such a statement bothers me for several reasons - the most obvious of which being how do we make that kind of call? No one is prepared to deal with something of this magnitude - the largest natural disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere. This just isn't comparable to anything. But beyond that, I believe such a statement fails to recognize the learned resilience of the Haitian people. Their coping skills may make them more capable than anyone of handling such epic tragedy, even if their buildings crumble like sand castles.

The other emerging Haiti discussion I take issue with is that of journalistic ethics and objectivity. I'm no journalism major, so I can't claim any academic knowledge of the specifics of this stuff, but I find anyone arguing that Sanjay Gupta should not be treating patients to be entirely ludicrous. I don't care if his caring for people mars his ability to be perfectly objective. In fact, he and every other journalist are human, and I would be severely disturbed if any of them were able to be 100% objective when placed squarely in the middle of this nightmare scenario. Isn't it the job of viewers to make their own interpretations anyway? Any half-educated person knows to take the news media with a grain of salt. If Dr. Gupta can save lives while raising awareness of the dire medical need in Haiti, that's all the better. If Anderson Cooper finds himself in the middle of a riot and needs to move an injured boy to keep him from getting trampled to death, then I'm all for it. This isn't a war - it's a humanitarian crisis with real people suffering real tragedies. To stand by idly and report in a monotone would be the true crime, textbook ethics be damned.