MURDER
Bodies lay decomposing in the streets.
Buried under mounds of concrete rubble.
Tossed into mass graves like human landfill.
The aftermath of a major earthquake,
the devastation was no twist of fate,
or work of a supernatural devil
This is murder
Jackhammers and drills and rescue teams save another foreign visitor trapped in a collapsed building while desperate Haitians in another part of town claw with bare fingers to free neighbors and family members.
Doctors are told to abandon their patients and faux concern over mob violence is used as an all-purpose raison d’être for the agonizingly slow-motion rescue while the clock runs out on those in need.
Haitian children chosen by loving American adoptive parents are safely flown to the United States while loving Haitian parents fleeing with their children in boats will be stopped and turned back by the U.S. Coast Guard.
This is murder
Commentators offer partial explanations.
Enormous poverty and a weak government
A massively overcrowded city and insubstantial infrastructure
Flimsy homes unable to withstand a sudden shift in the earth’s plates
Facts presented like a list of self-evident ingredients
Without history
or reason
or context
that would indicate anything criminal occurred
Just another unfortunate nation who
through no fault of our own
(though perhaps due to their own inadequacies)
ended up on the wrong side of life’s bounties
But this is murder.
The evidence is not hidden.
The proof not buried among the countless dead.
It lies in plain sight.
One needs only recount just a few moments of centuries past and present during which the Haitian people were methodically stripped of their wealth, their sovereignty and even their very lives.
The French cities built by profits gained from slavery and the billions over decades that Haiti was forced to pay to France for the loss of their once profitable slave colony.
The clearing of Haiti’s forests to make room for rubber and sisal plantations and the massive corruption by the brutal and repressive U.S. backed Duvalier regimes.
The death squads trained by the CIA and the governments installed or removed during a hundred years of ongoing U.S. intervention and invasion.
The thousands upon thousands of ruined farmers and families driven into makeshift homes in the slums of Port-au-prince seeking a way to survive because they could not compete with the cheaper-priced government-subsidized American rice forced into Haitian markets.
The $1 million a week the Haitian government did not spend on hospitals or roads or communication but sent to the World Bank and other foreign creditors, while mothers earning $2 a day making t-shirts in sweatshops filled their children’s empty stomachs with cookies made of salt, oil … and clay.
The pound of Haitian flesh has been taken so many times over.
The coffers of wealthy nations filled with their sweat and blood.
Their institutions shaped or discarded to suit the needs of their powerful neighbor to the north….
And yet we are expected to look at the rows of corpses,
the rivers of tears,
the agony of the survivors,
and still call it an act of god.
This is murder.
LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO ACT:
10 Things the US Can and Should Do for Haiti – Bill Quigley, Black Agenda Report
No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!, John Maxwell, Jamaica Observer
Fear of the poor is hampering Haiti rescue, Linda Polman, Times Online
shortmemory.wordpress.com 
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