Morning Thanks

Garrison Keillor once said we'd all be better off if we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing. I'll try.

Tuesday, October 04, 2016

Hurricane madness


They're called slurries. Sounds innocuous enough, but they aren't. Not at all. Slurries can wipe out entire neighborhoods, entire towns, killing hundreds in the poorest nation in the northern hemisphere, bar none. 

At this moment, the island nation of Haiti is being devastated by a brutish storm that threatens the entire region. All of Florida and much of this nation's southeast coastline is on alert from Hurricane Matthew, a monster that has Americans worried from the Keys to Washington DC. Where he goes is as yet to be determined, but there's no question about where he is now because he's in Haiti, a country still suffering from a massive earthquake six years ago, not to mention a cholera epidemic that's killed 10,000 people and still hasn't been beaten.

Haiti is mountainous and, more importantly, largely treeless. Twenty inches of rainfall--in some places as much as forty inches--will fall on those bald slopes, then rush down in what's called a slurry, an obscene mixture of mud and rocks and whatever else the avalanche picks up on its course to the sea. What it doesn't wipe out it will fill up. Weather officials have no crystal balls, but predictions of slurries in Haiti aren't nightmares. They're worse. They're real. 

Bill Clinton is not greatly admired in Haiti, and neither is the Clinton Foundation. Clinton believed that if he could fill a bathtub with money, he could clean the place up, do something no one else had--something lasting and foundational in a country many people call, graciously, "a failed state." Did he? That question has more than one answer, but most Haitians don't think he delivered on the glory he promised. 

Want to get in a fight? Propose a solution to the Haiti's woes. Go ahead--give it a try. So far, nothing has worked. Even Clinton proved a failure. 

People try. Oh, how they try. I remember sitting in the airport at Port au Prince, waiting for the flight out with only two kinds of people--Haitians looking to visit relatives in Florida and church groups in matching colorful, bible versed t-shirts. Hundreds, thousands of stateside do-gooders flock to Haiti; some say--many say--way, way too many. 

And soon, more. More devastation is almost certain, and it's happening at this moment, as I'm typing these words. "Staggering impacts," storm experts say, from a storm that's right now the size of Arizona. Drowning rains. 

It's cloudy outside right now at this lake home where we're staying. A northwest wind is blowing hard--started yesterday late afternoon after we finished a bike ride through a northwoods trail so colorful we were enclosed in stained glass. It was--and I couldn't help thinking of it then--at peak color, the reds and russets almost cartoonish. This morning, that peak color is behind us. The clouds mean there'll be no sunrise.

It's a metaphor, but we use it, don't we? Haiti, right at this moment, is getting punished by Hurricane Matthew, whose winds will blow thatched roofs off makeshift houses, pick up tin like cardboard. The people there don't deserve what they're getting any more than we do.

Go easy, Lord almighty. There are good people in Haiti, millions of them. Hold back the slurries. Go easy, please. . .

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is extremely difficult to imagine the Clintons getting rich exploiting this needy population... they did it and they are doing it..."most Haitians don't think he delivered on the glory he promised" and for that matter, Americans either... how does one make any sense out of this nonsense?

Then, if that is not bad enough, they are peddling influence with the contributions!

I am not asking for the Lord Almighty to go easy on these parasites. Lord, bless the Haitian people!

Jerry27 said...

I have been reading Kuiper's ideas's on the French Revolution -- as in (liberty, equalty, and fraternity)

It may be the storm that destroyed Haiti was this campaign to make everyone equal. Barnes review trys to say that prior to this storm of 1789, Haiti was the most productive part (paradise) of the western world.

http://barnesreview.org/product/the-barnes-review-october-1994-haiti-paradise-lost/

thanks,
Jerry

Ron said...

The Barnes Review?
Is that the outfit that denies the Holocaust?
Ugh!

Anonymous said...

I have a friend who is there in Haiti and she said that if you are going to donate anything, don't donate thru the Red Cross as they didn't deliver during the last disaster that hit Haiti awhile back.

J. C. Schaap said...

I didn't intent to demean former President Clinton, only to say that just about everyone who's been to Haiti or thought much about it knows that there is certainly no tougher place in the Northern Hemisphere to bring about real and lasting change. The Clinton Foundation forwarded millions, and the place is still almost beyond belief. One of these responses says the Red Cross can't be trusted. The UN came in to keep peace and brought cholera and death.

Things are not hopeless in Haiti; lots of good, good people are doing good, good work. We met some. But it is, as just about everyone says, "a failed state."

And today it's getting hit with yet another major natural calamity.

Lord, have mercy.

Anonymous said...

Well James, you gave back-peddling a try... it did not work! The Clinton Foundation has been well protected by the FBI, the Justice Department and the State Department... You slipped up on this one...

Jerry27 said...

For family reasons, my primary interest is -- what did the Barnes review say about Amelia Earhart?

Barnes said this.

"or were they(Noonan and Earhart) captured as spies by the Japanese as people of the Marshall Islands believe?"

The Barnes review may be so depraved that people who want the truth about Earhart should ask Barnes not to say anything about her. If they do it will cause us to get pigionholed as Holocaust denyers. But that would deny the desperation of families who have reason to believe they have been lied to.

I made some effort to get Amelia Earhart's mother positioned with Captain
Kahn's mother, but so far that has gone no where.

I could give a tour of families that do not accept what Uncle Sam has told them about members lost.


I am not an egalitarian, but some value should be given to those who have been lost. Below is a link.


For the fun of it, compare Wikipedia’s treatment of Amelia Earhart to the media treatment of Captain Khan.
Amelia Earhart: Truth Versus the Establishment – David Martin

http://www.dcdave.com/article5/160506.htm
Amelia’s mother claimed it was a government operation from the beginning.
thanks,
Jerry