Ayiti’s Storm

The earth seized

It tarnished its pearl

A vast nation a "gens de couleur"

Varied shades of brown

Buried in soot, covered in gray

This is their home

So home is where they’ll stay

Makeshift hospital equipment

Tarps become tents

Stealing shelter from barren trees

Paying Mother Nature rent

Entire lives amounted to piles of rubble

Schools, churches, and hospitals have crumbled

Death tolls double

Wandering the streets

Family trees shaken

Missing fruit

Lost children

Wandering parents

Grandparents uprooted

Concrete ashes worn as burial suits

The stench of sorrow

Mixed with the heat of the day

Makes it hard to breathe

This is a time of tumult

A time of storm
Yet…

It seems in tragedy…

There is a new reason to sing

I hear Creole voices ring

Wounded feet, broken hearts still dancing

Imagine,

Through all the hurt

You can still hear them praising

Feel the sun within them; smiling

While the world they once knew seems

To have begun decaying

Over the crying you still hear praying

Thankful

Within devastation and depression

We learn a new lesson

One of appreciation

Devotion to a nation seemingly forgotten

When bad things happen

Folk “Ask where is God?”

Peering into a young girl’s smile

Her eyes whisper:

"He is in us"

In the donated cogs screws and plaster

God is in every single bottle of water

Every Band-Aid

Every touch of a stranger that reminds an orphan of their mother

Love is in every diri grain

To show the God within us should be our daily aim

Our call to a life of service to others is made plain

Our faith in human kindness has the opportunity to be regained

Ayiti is hurting

And at this point in time

It’s okay

Because pain lets us know that something is broken

This amazing country has long been in need of fixing

Many bellies were empty long before the dry earth began shaking

A history so rich

Filled with

Periods of hurt and healing

The first Black nation

To gain independence

Fought for their indelible right to be free

Theirs is the blood of Royalty

And it runs deeper than the Atlantic Ocean

A jewel of the Caribbean Sea

Our prosperity means it’s our responsibility

To alleviate their situation

To comfort them in this time of grief

Storm winds cause turmoil that lead to the calm

Haiti can

Haiti wiil go on

My brothers and sisters are waiting

With open hearts and palms

For us to show the compassion we were given

This is a season of growing

Rebuilding

Healing

Not forgetting that this is a republic of resilience

Persistence

Resistance against anything against its best interest

Who's fought off control from countries distant

Including rule from the one we stand in at present

They’ve been down-trodden

It’s our turn to do the uplifting

Let’s join together to make Ayiti even better

Than it was before

"L'Union Fait La Force"

"Unity Creates Strength"

Strength to overcome the storm

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Written for the Renewal 4 Haiti Espwa (Hope) Benefit Concert on May 15, 2010. Renewal 4 Haiti is working to rebuild Hôpital Camejo in Léogâne, Haiti. Attendees & performers included  US Senator Michael Bennett, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, US Ambassador to Haiti Raymond Joseph, accomplished dancer Cleo Parker Robinson, as well as Denver CBS4 and NBC9 News' Gloria Neal & Bazi Kanani.

"Haiti is not our long-term responsibility. Detroit is." Article by David Gewirtz

This article by David Gewirtz raised some excellent points... I do believe we need to help Haiti, but we also cannot neglect our own soil which throughout the last few years as we have been "spreading democracy" has been growing worn. I always wonder when disaster strikes, when the war on terror breaks out, how money seems to pop out of nowhere. Hmm...anyways, read on.

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Haiti is not our long-term responsibility. Detroit is.

David Gewirtz | BIO
AC360° Contributor
Director, U.S. Strategic Perspective Institute

First, I'd like to send a good thought to all those suffering today in Haiti, and all their family members here in the United States.

No one can look at the horror of Haiti and not feel both a deep sense of sadness and a desire to help. It seems almost mean and selfish to suggest that we need to do something other than provide our full support to this devastated nation, but that's exactly what I'm about to do.

Over the next few weeks, there's going to be a crucial decision-making point when policy makers will have to decide whether to move from a perfectly valid emergency response policy to a potentially disastrous nation-building policy.

Since the 1960s, we have operated under President Kennedy's mandate of moral obligation:

"The answer is that there is no escaping our obligations: our moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor in the interdependent community of free nations - our economic obligations as the wealthiest people in a world of largely poor people, as a nation no longer dependent upon the loans from abroad that once helped us develop our own economy - and our political obligations as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom."

But times have changed since JFK was President and Dr. King gave his great speech challenging us to "let freedom ring" from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Today, we're again dangerously in debt, this time to "adversaries of freedom" like China. Many of our own people are desperately hurting.

Foreclosures rose by 21 percent in 2009. Nearly half of all Americans owe more on their homes than they're actually worth. As we've all come to know, millions of Americans over-reached and bought homes they knew they couldn't afford. But Americans need to live somewhere and the lack of affordable housing (whether to rent or own) is a huge problem in America.

Millions more Americans will lose their homes in 2010. Our bridges and levees are crumbling and at least one out of every ten American adults is out of work.

After more than four years, there are still people who haven't been able to return home from the damage inflicted by Katrina. Cities like Detroit and Chicago have unemployment rates above 22% and thousands of abandoned homes due to the damage inflicted by bankers and the financial industry.

America needs to get its own house in order.

Before we decide it's our responsibility to rebuild all the lost homes in Haiti, let's remember that it's our actual responsibility to make sure our own people have roofs over their heads.

Haiti isn't our problem alone. China and Germany and other economically powerful countries also have a "good neighbor" responsibility to less fortunate nations like Haiti. In fact, Haiti's not really our problem at all.

Our "good neighbor" responsibility today is to our actual neighbors here in America, the mom in Milwaukee, the dad in Detroit, the grandparents in Grand Rapids, and the brothers and sisters in Baltimore and Cincinnati - not the huddled masses of Haiti, horrifying as their situation might be.

Sure, for a few weeks, it makes sense to send American forces into Haiti to help them recover from the initial shock of the crisis. But with two wars already stop-lossing our troops to the breaking point, we can't afford to adopt another country as a matter of national policy.

Until we can make sure that the kids in Kentucky can get medical care, or the millions of uninsured Americans can have access to the drugs they need to stay alive, we can't commit to sending a never-ending supply of free medicine to another country while at the same time blocking lower-cost medicine from entering the U.S. at our borders - with the blessing of the U.S. Congress - simply because Big Pharma wants to make an even greater profit.

In the past week, we've seen cabinet members and the First Lady ask Americans to give $10 to the Red Cross by texting "HAITI". Perhaps, instead, these leaders should ask, nay, demand that all those bankers who bungled billions and stole millions in bonuses directly from taxpayers, send some of it to Haiti. Or perhaps, even, to the newly homeless in Houston.

I hesitated to write this article because those in Haiti are in a world of hurt and they truly need our help. Unfortunately, American policy makers tend to make long-term strategic mistakes in the name of compassion and good PR. We're already stretching our resources too thin. Taking on yet another long-term responsibility for yet another nation may mean we have to abandon more Americans in more American cities.

Once we fix our own problems, then we can muck around in other nations, trying to prove we still have the chops to be a "wise leader and good neighbor". But until we can take care of our own, we have no right trying to fix the ills of the entire world.

Follow David on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz.

Editor’s note: David Gewirtz is Director of the U.S. Strategic Perspective Institute and Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines. He is a leading Presidential scholar specializing in White House email. He is a member of FBI InfraGard, the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism & Security Professionals, a columnist for The Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, and has been a guest commentator for the Nieman Watchdog of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. He is a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley extension, a recipient of the Sigma Xi Research Award in Engineering and was a candidate for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Letters.