Robert C. Koehler
Devastation in Haiti
(c) Paul Tong
A bare foot sticks out of a pile of cinder blocks.
"They've been digging for five hours," says
OK, freeze frame. Something is so wrong with this picture, this moment: to be watching -- live! -- in comfortable detachment as a group of men dig desperately, by hand and with that single shovel, to free a 15-year-old girl trapped in the wreckage of a building. Will they get her out in time? Suddenly it felt like a "Star Trek" episode: "We have many extra shovels aboard the mother ship, but it's important that the Haitians free their survivors with their own tools. We're obliged to observe the cultural non-interference policy, you see."
I see her point and all, and have no personal criticism of Cooper, who was indeed doing his job. And the girl, within the span of the video clip, was rescued, seemingly unhurt. My sense of the obscenity of this viewing moment -- mike in the rubble, our live witness to the desperation of the rescue effort -- has nothing to do with the ethics of the profession, or "ethics" at all. It's infinitely bigger. It's about the compromised morality Cooper and most of his colleagues serve: the morality of our relationship to poverty, and
Come on, we know this, right? We don't exist in pristine isolation from "the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere."
Rather than portraying
I'm not saying this would be easy, or simple. We would still see the desperate survivors digging frantically in the rubble, or wandering the streets grief-stricken, looking for the corpses of their loved ones. But pity would turn to outrage if we began to see this tragedy in the context of centuries of ruthless geopolitics, which left
The West, particularly
From 1957 to 1986, the CIA-backed "anti-communist" Duvaliers -- Papa Doc and Baby Doc -- ruled
"They've been digging for five hours," says
Haiti - Sometimes the Earth is Cruel
Leonard Pitts Jr
That is ultimately the fundamental lesson here, as children wail, families sleep out of doors, and the dead lie unclaimed in the rubble that once was Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Haiti - Tragedy and Opportunity for Haiti
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The January 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, is the first test of the Obama administration's ability to mount a full-scale international disaster response, and it is no ordinary test. Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere, with abysmal infrastructure, struggling to stabilize
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(C) 2010 Robert C. Koehler