Griper Blade: Hating Haiti

The reaction to the earthquake in Haiti has been largely helpful, with a few notable exceptions. "[T]he international community's response has been generous and robust, and we are gearing up rapidly and effectively despite the challenging circumstances," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday. "This afternoon the UN will launch an emergency flash appeal for around $550 million. Most of this money will go to urgent needs: food and water are in critically short supply." According to Secretary Ban, 50% of the buildings in the Port-au-Prince area have been "damaged or destroyed" and a "high proportion of the 3 million people in the capital area are without access to food, water, shelter and electricity." A spokesman for the Pan American Health Organization, the hemispheric wing of the World Health Organization, says that the death toll remains unknown, but that a "variety of sources are estimating the numbers [at] between 50,000 and 100,000."

As I've said, there have been a few exceptions to the global outpouring of goodwill and aid. The first who comes to mind is right wing icon, Pat Robertson. For Pat, the earthquake was Haitian's fault -- because they'd sold their souls to the devil. Robertson's reaction was a simpleminded Christian rationalization; instead of asking why his god allows bad things to happen to good people, Pat makes things easier for himself and his followers by saying that the Haitians aren't good people. You see this sort of shallow idiocy after every major disaster -- following Hurricane Katrina, the destruction of a large section of New Orleans was blamed on abortion. God hadn't allowed an incomprehensible tragedy to strike good people, New Orleanians were terrible people who tolerated something that brought down God's wrath. That the city was way too accepting of gays and lesbians probably didn't help any.

Others didn't have their superstitions to blame for their clueless insensitivity. Talk radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh took it as an opening to attack President Obama, saying that he was politicizing the event to generate support from the black community -- as if Barack Obama needed help in that department. The fact that Limbaugh was himself politicizing the disaster to attack Obama was probably lost on the vast majority of his fans who, it must be said, are stupid beyond the ability of the English language to adequately express... [CLICK TO VIEW FULL POST]