16043: Wolf: Re: 16010: Goodman Re: 16004: Saint-Vil: Foreing Gang Playing dangerous games (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: casey wolf <talkhaiti@yahoo.ca>

i'm a bit behind in the mail so this may already have
been thoroughly responded to.  apologies if so.

i tend to get nervous when people sling mud but when i
read the original message (from jafrikayiti, i
believe) i did not have that strong a reaction.
however when i read brian goodman's reply i did feel a
bit squeamish.  forgive me, brian, if i use your note
as a springboard for some thoughts this brings up for
me.  some of what i will say is directed to you but
most of it is much more general and i hope you will
bear with me.

i think the issue isn't whether or not americans or
canadians or whomever love haiti, or about whether en
masse we are good guys or bad guys.  i don't think it
helps to oversimplify either the facts of history or
the motivations of others—-which i think both authors
have done a little of.  the fact is that there are
many people of many attitudes in all countries and
while some act out of love and do good, others act out
of love and do harm.  others are not in the least
motivated by love, and most of us fall into one or
another of those categories on different days,
depending on how clear our thinking is in given areas
and so on.  i think to be really helpful we need to as
honest as we can and see not only what we passionately
want and where the other guy has smegged up but also
where we screw up, where our fellow nationals screw
up, to just take a breath and say okay, that really
was crap, wasn't it; i regret it and let's try again.
just because we want to do good doesn't necessarily
mean that we always do, or that all of our compatriots
even want to.  there are many agendas around besides
our own acknowledged ones.  of course there is harm
going toward haiti nowadays from other countries; this
will remain true (and a difficult and multi-levelled
issue) even if it is also true that there are screwups
from within haiti as well.

i sometimes get the feeling that people think the
problems of haiti are somehow haiti's problems, unique
to it and unrelated to attitudes and assumptions and
activities in other countries around the world.  i was
once very surprised when a woman remarked on how
difficult it must have been for me to see a place with
so many problems, as if there were more problems there
than here.  that is to me like saying in a family
where there has been a long history of abuse that the
child who ends up most visibly showing the hurts of
that abuse is the one who has the problem.  another
child might seem to fit quite well into the rules of
society but be just as injured inside.  not to mention
the older folk, who like all nations, whether "first"
or "third" world, white or black, have inherited deep
and confusing scars from a long history of domination
and neglect of many types, not only between races and
nationalities, but in every level of our societies,
and within our own families.  if we look honestly and
sensitively, this can be seen and addressed and over
time it can be healed, so that we don't continue
perpetrating wrongs on each other and ourselves simply
because we don't understand and are afraid to look at
what we, at what our societies, are doing.

this may seem way off the track of this conversation
but i don't think it is.  it is difficult not to want
to go on the attack (sometimes called the defensive)
when people say things which seem to us to overlook a
huge part of our experience, to devalue our efforts,
to reject our sincerely offered attempts at righting
wrongs, no matter which side of a given issue or
racial or other divide we are from.  people get very
hot under the collar around things that seem racist to
them, whether as in this case they are a white person
reacting to a black person's anger about racism, or a
black person reacting to a white person's ignorance
about certain vital issues that a person of colour is
not likely to have missed.  (about white on black
racism, brian-—it is obvious and profound, even if you
dispute the specifics he mentioned.  i have no idea
whether the giuliani accusation is true but certainly
it would not be hard to find cases where it clearly
is, so i would tend to let a remark like this go by,
myself.)  anyway, it's natural to react strongly-—we
have a huge history of not only deliberate hate and
violence but destructive and hurtful misunderstanding
between well-meaning people, and it is not all from
years ago but is very current, in all of our lives,
whether we see it or not.  we need to learn to look at
this history—-and this current situation—-and deal
with it, even when it makes us uncomfortable to do so.
 not only the history of slavery, but of our own
governments' deliberate manipulation of ourselves and
other nations, of our own assumptions about what is
normal and what is right-—where they are based on
colonial attitudes we haven't even begun to
examine—-and so on.  i don't think we can make
significant progress toward solving either haiti's
problems or our own until we look at it in a broad
context and tackle the underlying issues.  and it is
always most powerful to clean up where we ourselves
are out of sync, out of line, or just plain ignorant,
to learn from others and try to stretch our
perspective a lot, in other words to clean up our own
back yard while giving, while doing, what we can.
we're not bad.  but we sure aren't perfect, either.

i won't go on and on forever, but i do want to speak
to a couple of specific remarks:

"Don't bite the hand that feeds you."  i found that
comment very offensive.  people forget that this
refers to a dog.  not even a wild dog, free and
capable of rounding up its own food but a captive,
dependent dog.  i know it is not meant this way but we
should be aware of the undertones of our language.
automatically the person being spoken to is put in a
one-down position.  the implication is that this is
not a conversation between peers but a chastising of a
subject being.  if i was that dog, suicidal as it may
be, i would want to chew that hand right off.  people
don't want handouts.  we want free lives and
self-determination.  even if it was true that the
countries mentioned were only trying to help, for one
country to take for itself the resources of the world
and dole little bits out to the rest depending on the
extent to which they ascribe to its view of how the
world should be run is not a situation that is going
to lead to cooperation and sharing.  but i will back
away from that particular soapbox before i start
frothing at the mouth.

brian, i seem to have come down on you here and i am
sorry if it sounds that way.  i do appreciate your
caring and your efforts, and your understanding that
in wealthy countries we take all too much for granted,
and have no conception of what is really happening for
people elsewhere.  (i was amused to see a headline in
our newspaper yesterday: "police should have knocked
in pot raid, courts decide."  imagine if the tonton
macoutes had had to knock.)  but i am inviting you to
venture even further in your departure from the
traditional complacency of our way of thinking, and
investigate whether it might be true that haitians
have something to be angry about right now, whether it
is possible that even when we are
well-intentioned—-even perhaps when you yourself are
well-intentioned—- decisions are sometimes made that
in a subtle way bring harm, and that much of this
comes from a lack of understanding of the bigger
picture, and that some of it comes from a natural but
destructive unwillingness to question our deepest
assumptions and upset some applecart, to threaten our
own security on some level.

the other comment you made was about the world "taking
out the militant military that was Murdering
Haitians".  the story is, as i understand it, far more
complicated than that.  for example, the cozy
relationship between the u.s. and the duvaliers for
decades—truly murderous folk who were given all sorts
of aid.  i would recommend paul farmer's book "the
uses of haiti", which has a new edition out.
really-—please make an effort to get the other side of
that story.

it is unreasonable to ask that bygones be bygones when
they haven't yet gone by.  our job as foreigners who
decide for one reason or another that we want to have
something to do with a country not our own is to go
very far out of our way to learn about the issues from
many points of view and to do a lot of introspection
about our own attitudes.  i think in a country so
impacted by racism we cannot get away with not coming
to a fairly deep understanding of how it works so that
we can see where it may be perpetuated even now, even
by our well-meaning selves.  i'd go so far as to say
that it's our job in the main, outside of practical
things like how to run a computer or perform surgery
or what-have-you, to listen and learn rather than talk
and attempt to teach, no matter how pissed off we may
get at the speaker at times, no matter how wrong we
are sure he or she is, even if we are not in this
moment being spoken to in the way we deserve.  still
we need to take what we are able from what is said,
put it into context, and learn from our own reactions.
 i am speaking generally here, not about you in
particular.  i don't know you or what you know or have
done-- obviously you are aware of many issues i am not
educated on.  i apologize if i am being presumptuous.

i think sometimes we want things to be much simpler
than they ever can be.  i know i sure as hell do.
when we are good people, and we know we are, who are
doing our best to help others, to share our own good
fortune, we want them to see our goodness and be kind
and appreciative.  there is nothing wrong with that.
but it isn't always possible.  we all come with so
much background that is unaddressed, often unexamined.
 we all make things more complicated than we would
like, and together we can make it real whacky
sometimes.  we get unreasonable and argumentative when
our collars get hot.  i guess what i really want is
for all of us to just settle down and stick to the
business of being allies to each other, not take the
slings and arrows so personally, and always review to
see where we can be more clear and honest and
responsible in our own undertakings.  it's the best i
think that we can do.

okay.  so now i guess i can get ready for a sling or
an arrow, myself.

cheers, all.

casey

 --- Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu> wrote: >
>
> From: Brian Goodman <bdgoody2002@yahoo.com>
> ----------------------------------------
>
> I am sorry that you feel that way about the US,
> Canada, and France.  I am
> an
> American and I love the country of Haiti and its
> people.  People think I
> am
> nuts here for wanting to go to Haiti all of the time
> but we take things
> for
> granted here in the States and it is good to get
> away from that.  However,
> the
> racial tone in your letter is disheartening.  The
> cheap shots on Mayor
> Guiliani
> and the NYPD were uncalled for.  Don't bite the hand
> that feeds you.  The
> US,
> Canada, and France have for years have all tried to
> help Haiti better
> itself.
> I am only speaking of the nineties to the present.
> If the world did not
> care
> for Haiti, they would not have taken out the
> militant military that was
> Murdering Haitians daily.  Haiti's problem is the
> mistake of a leader that
> we
> put in place in 94.  Aristede is a Clintonian.  He
> cares only for himself
> and
> not the country of Haiti.  I really enjoyed the 2.2
> million US dollars
> that
> Aristede and his cronies used to fix the national
> highway north of PAP.  I
> am
> sorry... I meant fill the potholes and stick FLAGS
> up out in the middle of
> nowhere.  The problem is Aristede takes the money
> that those countries
> give him
> and misuses it.  I work for DOT and I can tell you
> that 2.2 million
> dollars
> covers a lot more than potholes.  They could have
> stripped the road down
> and rebuilt a good portion of it, if they needed to
> for less than the 2.2.
>
> I love the country of Haiti.  Haiti has a lot of
> potential but as long as
> corrupt people are in power...it will be hard to
> prosper.  It will take
> years
> to undo wrongs that have been occuring for decades.
> Please refrain from
> verbally attacking the countries now.  I agree that
> France, the US and
> others
> prior to the modern era treated Haiti with
> disrespect.  That was in the
> past,
> but let bygones be bygones.  I love Haiti and pray
> that they will see the
> fruits of a prosperous government but I assure you
> that kicking the
> "foreigners' out will not help Haiti.
>
> Brian G.
>
>


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