Posted on 01/24/2010 7:00:10 AM PST by shortstop
Apparently there is no Haitian word for “thank you.”
At least not as translated by the American news media. A week since a horrific earthquake knocked Haiti to smithereens, reporting on the incident has hardened into an endless complaint about the failure of relief efforts.
From the first days of the tragedy, when TV reporters spoke breathlessly from the shattered streets of Haiti, the questioning of locals has centered around how long they’ve gone without water, if they’re upset they haven’t been given food yet, and why they think no one has come to help them.
In these halcyon days of the entitlement era, we curse the Good Samaritan.
In this day of live satellite telecasts, the all-seeing eye of the American media sees nothing but failure. As if reading from a script, with all the intellect of a reject from last season’s “Real World,” they feign indignation at the United States for not “doing something.”
One of the largest, fastest and most efficient relief efforts in the history of the world – under some of the most difficult of circumstances – and the propagandists on the evening news curse the nation that is leading it and the stalwarts who are conducting it.
America is bending over backward to relieve millions of Haitians, providing the lion’s share of money and materiel, shipping supplies by the hundreds of tons, giving leadership and organization to a global effort, and for that we get slapped across the face.
The French and the Venezuelans say we’re trying to occupy Haiti. The news media says we’re bumbling incompetents. And every TV around the world has survivors complaining about this, that or the other, wondering why the Americans have abandoned them.
Well, it’s all a bunch of crud.
And an honest assessment shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that the United States and its military are doing a Herculean job, performing at near miraculous levels and bringing order out of chaos.
Here are the facts.
Haiti had no real functioning government before the earthquake. There were several thousand U.N. peacekeepers on the ground before the disaster, trying to keep Haitians with machetes from hacking one another to death.
When the earthquake came, the flimsy infrastructure crumbled into nothing. Transportation and communication became impossible. Municipal water and electricity disappeared.
Civil authority – through the Haitian police or military, or government structure – failed in every regard. There was no real Haitian government response because there was no Haitian government.
There was no discernible emergency response from any structure within Haiti except for U.N. troops, who were themselves hit hard by the earthquake and who suffered heavy casualties.
Access to the outside world – the source of all relief – was substantially cut off. The airport is inadequate to heavy airlift on its best days, with limited fueling services, a single runway and limited space for aircraft parking. To make matters worse, the control tower was destroyed in the earthquake.
At the port, the best place for bringing things into the country, the piers and cranes were lost. For shipping purposes, the port was destroyed.
It was a perfect storm. No outside access, no communication, no transportation, no infrastructure, no central authority, a Haitian government that was slow to ask for or accept aid or advice, and guys with machetes intent on looting and robbing whatever and whoever they could.
Against that backdrop, tens of thousands of people died, easily a million were displaced, countless were injured and the United States ran in to help.
American military air-traffic controllers coordinated the arrival of scores of aircraft from across the country and around the world. The American military flew in to clear roads, suppress violence and put together a distribution system.
Thousands of tons of emergency supplies were gathered and transported, the airport was made functional, supply points were created, search-and-rescue crews were deployed and emergency clinics were constructed.
While idiot reporters, without the slightest comprehension of the scope of the task at hand, quizzed soldiers about why they didn’t airdrop food in or land helicopters here and there. They seemed unable to grasp the fact that airdropped food tends to crush people and start riots, and that in a crowded and shattered urban area, places to land a helicopter are few and far between.
The rescuers, from America and elsewhere, were doing the work of the angels. They were achieving incredible success in the face of near-insurmountable obstacles. They were creating an entire national distribution system out of thin air. They were bringing tens of millions of government and philanthropic dollars with them, and enough food to feed a large American city for weeks. All were separated from their families, some were putting themselves at personal risk, many were volunteers.
And yet they are the bad guys.
They are the ones criticized on the network news. They are the ones who are being described, essentially, as uncaring and lazy.
One of the largest natural disasters in the history of the hemisphere, with a massive population in a dysfunctional society, and the United States is being kicked in the teeth for not having a tent, sleeping bag, water and food to everybody the next day.
Well, the reporters have it backwards. The United States and its people – like the other nations who have come to help – are performing wonders. Never in history has such a decimated population been so quickly relieved. Never has an effort to help, on this scale, come off so well.
But you won’t see that on the evening news.
Because, as the reporters translate it, there is no word for “thank you” in Haitian.
Thre is no “Haitian word” for thaank you because there is no such language as “Haitian”. They speak FRENCH in Haiti and a dialect derived from it called “Creole”.
This is exactly the situation in New Orleans during and after Katrina except it was even tougher there. The city was under water. Yet, the Democrats and the media jumped all over Bush for every problem and for not immediately solving them.
Only, it isn't the msm's word, it's the author's words.
Much of AFP’s noise on the topic stemmed from a single flight that was refused priority, that was there to evacuate French citizens, many of whom were wealthy Haitians with dual citizenship. Cry me a river. IIRC Sarkozy told them to stick a sock in it. AFP is institutionally anti-U.S.-military.
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