“Gangs Armed With Machetes Loot Port-Au-Prince.” “Angry Haitians block roads with corpses.” “Looting on Rise amid Haiti’s Growing Desperation.” These are some of the shocking headline news that come from Haiti these days. A small 99 percent black nation who inhabits half of a Caribbean island that should have been a paradise but weren’t, turned into a hell on Earth. America’s reaction was what one would expect: spontaneous fund raisers and humanitarian help initiatives, as well as mobilization of U.S. troops to deliver relief to people that on January 12, 2010, were stoke by a deadly disaster, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude.

But our natural sympathy that we feel for the needy should not make us uncritical of how do they react to their misfortunes. Generous help and heart-felt compassion that we extend to others, and rightly so, does not require that we approve of their barbaric actions or ignore manifestations of their primitive nature. We are a benefactor and not a guilty party here, so there is no rational justification for us to have a sense of guilt that impairs our other senses. The fact that they were stricken by disaster does not entitle them to anything, nor does it absolve them from the sins of their lawlessness and selfishness (just to name a few).

I can’t help noticing a pattern here. When hurricane Katrina flooded the city of New Orleans in 2005, a reaction of multitudes of blacks there bore a striking similarity to what we see in Haiti today: looting, violence, and anger that the relief for their overgrown population did not arrive fast enough. I still can’t forget their collective refusal to help themselves, even after they were given food, shelter, and comfort in other cities. As a group, they acted as if they were just waiting for wealth redistribution now, expecting others to take full care of them. How dramatically different it was from instantaneous self-help in neighbor white communities that, although devastated even more than New Orleans was, without waiting for FEMA or other agency or group united spontaneously in their desperate efforts to preserve and rebuild whatever they lost to the raging forces of nature.

Natural and man-made disasters of biblical proportions hit entire nations once in a while, and blacks have no monopoly on being subjected to their devastating effects. This is when these nations show what they really are. After the second world war, most of Europe was burned down and saw its population decimated by war’s atrocities. Yet the Czechs, the Poles, the Dutch, the French, the Russians, and other European nations did not expect their “entitlements” to arrive. They did not wait for America or any other savior nation to rescue them and fix the problems that were brought on their heads. They immediately started to rebuild their countries, instead, even before their wounds, physical as well as emotional, begun to heal. And they succeeded.

It is in our nature to help those who suffer, regardless whether they are good or bad, friends or foes. After all, we aren’t called a civilized nation for nothing.  But helping to multiply population of those who cannot survive on their own and resort to anger and violence when hard work and human compassion is very much in order would be an unforgivable idiocy that only hard-core Liberals can advocate. Haitians showed their true colors in time of peril and probe, as did New Orleans, Somalis, and many others whose colors we were trained to ignore. Fact that they are dark-skinned is not the problem here; how do they act when left to their own device is. It’s good to never forget that.

January 15, 2010

~ The Author ~
Mr. Dwyer has been a continuing contributor to the Federal Observer. Mark Andrew Dwyer’s commentaries (updated frequently) can be found here. Send your comments to readerswrite@yahoo.com.