Late to the party

[danalwyn]

Earlier I linked to a David Brooks column in the NYTimes of Jan 15, 2010 as a direct part of this post. However, it's been pointed out to me that even though we start at the same point, his final conclusions are sufficiently objectionable that attempting to relate the two arguments causes confusion. To that end, I have removed the reference, since it is irrelevant to the final post I made. I am leaving the rest of the post as-is to preserve the original source of the argument, although I am putting it under an LJ-cut since this is getting long. I should repeat that this affray was entirely my fault for not making myself clear.



The Chinese sometimes had an odd theory about their emperors, the idea that in the time of bad emperors, those who focused on their own pleasures rather then running their country, the divine mandate of heaven would fall. And as the Emperors fell from favor, China would suffer from increased crime, lawlessness, and worst of all, natural disasters that would level entire provinces. Most of us no longer believe that every natural disaster is a direct message from God, but there may be truth behind what it says about government.

Haiti was just devastated by a quake that registered a 7.0 on the Richter scale. Like many thousands of other Americans, I have experienced, and survived, a 7.0 quake, in my case the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. The Loma Prieta quake struck in the middle of the heavily populated San Francisco Bay Area, the Haitian quake next to the heavily populated city of Port-au-Prince. The Loma Prieta quake killed 63 people, the Haitian quake and its after-effects will be lucky if it only kills 63,000. Despite the huge bridges, the overpasses, the dangerous coastline, the high-rise buildings, the Loma Prieta quake hit a first-world country, with modern building codes enforced by city agencies, with clear streets and well-mapped utilities, where emergency services were standing by, where people had been trained what to do, and where heavy equipment was on hand only minutes away from disaster zones. Port-au-Prince had a sky high population density with none of the benefits, a disaster waiting to happen. The Bay Area was capable of getting on with its business in days, Port-au-Prince may be destroyed for years to come.

And this should remind us of one thing. Earthquakes are preventable disasters. You can't stop the earthquake, but there's no reason that an earthquake should be anything other then a moderate inconvenience. If you want to stop tragedies like this, don't invest so much in the disaster relief teams that come by later to clean up the mess. Invest in the countries vulnerable to them. Earthquakes, like fires, floods, famines, hurricanes, plagues, and all other natural disasters, can be handled by competent, efficient governments with much reduced loss of life. Haiti doesn't need hundreds of millions of dollars worth of disaster relief now, it needed just millions of dollars to nurture a stable and capable government before the earthquake happened. Remember that when you look at where disaster might strike next.

ETA: Since it's not clear, I wrote this as an indictment of the US, and the first world's, foreign aid policy. Several generations of short-term planning, along with that particular US conservative bent, have changed things to follow the same idea as conservative health care - no preventative care, only disaster relief. The point is that we need to send millions to Haiti now, but what we really should have done was send millions to Haiti earlier, and they might not need this level of relief. I'm hoping that this whole incident will serve as a warning for the future, and for how we deal with foreign aid to other nations.

Comments

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

I'm pointing out that the reason Haiti didn't have those resources is because it has been fucked over by everyone and everything; if we want to prevent these sort of problems, we need to be prepared to help nations develop the kind of infrastructure they need to resist this affair, rather then simply come later to pick up the pieces.

[lookingforwater.livejournal.com]

Brooks was really, really not saying that, and I don't know how you managed to read otherwise.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Brooks and I started from the same point, that poverty is the cause of disasters, not the other way around. However, you are correct that I do not agree with his endpoint, so I will remove the reference from my post with explanation.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

I feel I owe you a more direct explanation of what I was thinking; the problem is that Brooks and I started from the same analogy (which I had even before he used it), and the same root cause; the earthquake disaster was caused by poverty. I felt that attempting to write something in that vein without referencing his article, at the very least, would invite calls of plagiarism. Because of this I referenced it without thinking about how his conclusions would taint my own argument. This was my fault, and I am sorry that it happened.

[lookingforwater.livejournal.com]

I don't think anyone except Pat Robertson and his gang of merry idiots is arguing that the scope of the tragedy in Haiti has its roots in anything other than the nation's extreme poverty. No one's going to accuse you of plagiarism for using that as a starting point.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

That's not true actually. I've seen several people attempt to pass this off as an "Act of God" and something we never could have predicted. The earthquake itself might be an Act of God, but the fact that sooner or later something was going to damage Haiti pretty badly was obvious, and I'm tired of people pretending that there was nothing we could have done previously.

(Then again, those might have been Robertson's henchmen).