13081 Corbett posts RE: Danger in Haiti

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Charles Daneille in his post 13080 says:


USA State
has said there is no part of Haiti considered safe.

-------------

I've been going to Haiti since 1983 and have been there for serveral
coup d'etat or attempted coup, the aborted elections of October
1987 and many other such events.

It seems to me that the U.S. State Department ALWAYS says Haiti is
dangerous.

But the notion of danger is a very subjecting thing.  How much danger is
too much?  One of my colleagues at my university used to describe me as
a person with "an underdeveloped sense of danger."  And people laughed
at the cute witicism.  Yet we realized that were we all to make a
list of our own danger quotients there would be a scale.  My friend
who make the joke on me would likely have been at the top of the
scale hardly daring to cross the street.  I might well have been at the
bottom of the list.  But were there 20 of us there would have been
20 different spots and 20 different notions of what is "too" dangerous or
even dangerous at all.

The U.S. popular culture as I see it in my time has undergone a RADICAL
reevaluation of what is "too" dangerous.  I'm a kid or the 1940s and
what today might be seen as too dangerous was just a normal part of our
lives.  We never heard of seat belts or batting helmuts and when I played
high school football we wore helmuts but no face guards and on and on and
on.

When I started going to Haiti I was equipped to know that the whole world
could be dangerous and I would have to deal with my particular
environment.  I lived that way in Haiti, the U.S., my many trips to Europe
and so on.  I got into troubles and difficulties now and again and that's
just life.

But one can hide from every whisper of danger and miss life too.

I'd be very curious if any of the scholars on the list who watch such
things have any idea of just how much of the past 20 years, and especially
since about 1983 when Haiti's popular movements began to gain public
strenght -- in those years how often has Haiti been on that U.S. warning
system?  It would seem to me like it's there most of the time.

For me that makes it like the children's story of the little boy who cried
wolf.  AFter a while no one would pay attention.

Bob Corbett