Haiti and the Voodoo Curse: The cultural roots of the country's endless misery.

Wall Street Journal ^ | February 5, 2010 | Lawrence Harrison

[Albion Wilde]

Good comments, Jeff, you think clearly....What you speak of is Christian _idealsim_, which is a beautiful concept. I wish more Christians expressed their idealism.

The backpedaling begins. Christians are just a bunch of superstitious yahoos approximately equivalent to voodoo believers, uh, uh, uh, EXCEPT for a handful of idealists, uh, uh, uh, of which you are one -- yeah, that's the ticket!

[ladyjane]

Let me get this straight.

What you are saying is Haitians have reproduced way beyond the point of being able to feed themselves.

Don’t you think that’s a problem in and of itself?

BTW, before the earthquake there were approximately 350,000 orphans in that country. Another problem.

All the money isn’t going to solve these problems until the Haitians start doing something different.

[Albion Wilde]

Haiti thread ping!

[Donald Rumsfeld Fan]

Most people hate rich people out of jealousy.

Doesn't one of the Ten Comandments prohibit this? "Thou Shall Not Covet".

[La Lydia]

Thank you, you hit the nail on the head. All the world’s woes are not the fault of the United States.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Demographics is a funny bird. One standard is that poor nations have a high reproduction rate until they achieve a certain plateau of prosperity, unique to them. Then very suddenly, the number of children per family drops to between 2.3 and 2.1, just sustainability.

Most recently, this happened in Mexico, which had maintained a birthrate of about 6 for decades. Then, in just a few years, it plummeted, attributable to reaching a plateau of national prosperity. Importantly, the highest birthrate among Mexicans remained among illegal aliens in the US—higher than in Mexico. But this is dropping rapidly as well.

There has been an interesting concept being shared by those nations assisting Haiti, that for once, instead of funneling money through their useless and corrupt government, the relief will be in material goods, distributed by these nations, while *ignoring* the Haitian government.

In other words, these other nations can ship in building supplies, and erect a lot of good quality housing quickly, which is then given to people as their own, at a fraction of the time and expense of going through the Haitian government.

Everything to improve their society, from setting up marketplaces and putting Haitians to work running them, providing food and medicine, getting children in school, even creating a more honest police force, is done while ignoring their government. I think the idea is once they actually see how things can work, they will be less inclined to going back to what doesn’t work.

Of course, the odds favor that this won’t work, but we can hope.

[constitutiongirl]

I would have remembered reading something with such a great title!! I think what I read may have been an anthropologist’s dry PhD dissertation.