Archives for January 2010

I think I need to have my head examined: I agreed with Bill O’Reilly today. Before we get to how there needs to be a little background.

While I am amazed and astonished by the donations that have rushed in to help the victims of Haiti’s recent earthquake – as of Friday, January 15, reports about the “text a donation” to the Red Cross campaign put the figure some where between $7M USD and $8M USD which doesn’t include the $2M USD that has poured into Wyclef Jean’s questionable charity or the donations by individual celebrities – I am also moved to ask a fundamental question about this sudden compassion for Haiti and its people: Where where was it on Monday before the earthquake?

On Monday, before Port-au-Prince collapsed in its entirety, Haiti was dismally poor with a population suffering the effects of decades of not just mismanagement but outright corruption. According to a 2005 USAID report, the average life expectancy in Haiti was 53 years-old. Literacy rates hovered between 48% and 52% and the average per-capita income was about $400 a year where income distribution left more than three quarters of the population living below the poverty line. Even though the report doesn’t say anything about it, food insecurity – which is a wonky way of saying not having any clue where your next meal is coming from or when – was probably frighteningly high.

Haiti was and is by all estimation the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

Stunning to think about isn’t it? Just imagine for a minute: for the U.S. in 2005 comparable figures would have meant 224,772,395 people living below the poverty line. And given that the poverty line is a bull shit number anyway – it’s calculated on the cost of feeding a family of four in 1966 for a year – that is an even more frightening statistic regardless of which country you apply it to.

And these stats are for Haiti after the country received $865M USD in aid from the U.S., Canada, Taiwan, the EU, and a World Bank/IMF credit in 2003. In 2004, more than $1B USD was pledged for two years for relief and development efforts in Haiti. Or, to quote Mr. O’Reilly:

TV talker Bill O’Reilly, for example, said he gives to a private charity that helps Haiti but has a dim view of government aid: “[T]he USA will once again pour millions into that country, much of which will be stolen. Once again, we will do more than anyone else on the planet, and one year from today, Haiti will be just as bad as it is right now.”

– “‘The earth shook to open people’s eyes’ to needy Haiti”, Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post, January 18, 2010, A6.

Yes, absolutely, we need to help with earthquake relief efforts. The devastation is amazing and heart wrenching and the human cost will be, when all the bodies are found, stunningly high. But why wasn’t the poverty in Haiti important to us as a people, not as a government but as a people, before now? Because it wasn’t in our face and we have the capacity to ignore indefinitely what isn’t pushed in our face by some natural or man-made disaster?

Or is it because we do care but it’s damn hard to be really invested when you know (but can not prove), that the effect of your donation – because let’s be honest, most of us aren’t going to quit our jobs and go be relief workers anywhere: it takes a special class of person to do that – is going to be virtually nil because the system into which it’s going is designed to benefit the top 1% and the top 1% already have so much more than everyone else that your $10 isn’t even going to register?

Given as a country we’ve said that we will send Haitians who land in the U.S. directly back to Haiti, I don’t know what to think.

The only thing I do know is that our attitudes as Americans toward poverty, both in and out of our country, make my head hurt.

If you are moved by the devastation in Haiti and care about making an impact on poverty in areas not 60% populated by TV commentators, try giving to an organization like Doctors Without Borders (U.S. – Other locations) or Action Aid (U.S. – Other locations) which consistently work to reduce the effects of poverty around the globe.

In retrospect, I probably should have stayed with print journalism. A strange thing to say, I know, given the number of articles about the death of print media, the number of layoffs surviving newspapers have done in the past six months, and the number of newspapers that have gone online only. Still, I think sticking with it would have benefited me in the long run.

I wrote exactly one article for my high school newspaper. Published in the issue we did on the 20th anniversary of JFK‘s assassination, I remember it distinctly mostly because I hated writing it. The subject was merit pay – a proposed system wherein a teacher’s pay would be based not on seniority but on how well that teacher’s students performed (usually on standardized tests) – and how our county school board’s proposal was being received by the teaching staff.

Even though the system wasn’t supposed to go into effect for another 5 to 7 years, teachers in the county were already talking about something called “work to the rule” where they would work the hours they were scheduled and no more. “Work to the rule” would have had a negative impact on after school clubs and activities, and it also would have made teachers unavailable for providing additional help to students whose grades were marginal or who were floundering. In the go-go 1980s when your application to college could be made or broken based on how many extracurricular activities in which you had participated, the student body had a vested interest in keeping those clubs and application padding activities flourishing. Me, I really didn’t give a shit. Yet, there I was, an eager freshman who had to produce 400 words on the merit pay system, teachers’ reactions, and how it might impact the student body, and all with no trace of bias. Yes, this was back in the days when we still believed in such a thing as “objective reporting.”

It wasn’t that the subject held no interest for me, and that it was quite possible that I would get assigned other equally boring topics, that really turned me off the whole student journalist thing. What really soured the whole thing was that I couldn’t just write the objective article using sources, like school board and teacher’s union press releases, and previously published accounts. No, I had to actually go out and talk with people (read: teachers and other students) to find out what they thought. More importantly, I had to talk with them in a way that encouraged them to tell me what they actually thought rather than what they thought would sound best or what they thought I wanted to hear.

People don’t say what they mean, not usually anyway. And it’s like pulling teeth to get them to be direct about anything. We talk around things. We talk in metaphors. We use body language, something that isn’t especially useful or easy to portray on the printed page, to convey meaning and hope against hope that the other person somehow gets what we’re trying to say.

Not only do we not say what we mean, we very often don’t say what we want. Happily we’ll defer to another person’s decision making only to spend the evening seething because no, really, you didn’t want to see Twilight: New Moon but you did say you didn’t care so…there you are trying to resist the urge to scream at the screen because Bella is such a dishrag.

We obfuscate, particularly when we feel the emotional stakes are high. We dodge. We shift. We tell half-truths. We bury the important stuff in the middle of other stuff that isn’t important and hope no one notices it. Sometimes, we even use a sneaky little technique where we actually answer the question we were asked no the question the person doing the asking actually meant to ask. In short, getting the truth out of most people is more than a bit like mining: lots of digging with very little yield.

It’s because of this, and because 80% of the time I am no better in my interpersonal communications, that I think sticking with print journalism could have helped me. Being required to talk with people I don’t know, people who don’t necessarily trust me, would have forced me to develop better listening skills, and better question asking skills. It would have forced me to pay attention to what people don’t say as much as what they say rather than treating them as if they were behaving the way I want them to behave (that is: saying what they actually mean).

I know it certainly would have improved my ability to write good dialogue. That in and of itself would have made the slog through journalism school worth it.

I’m not saying I think radical honesty would make life easier. But I do think that life would certainly improve if we all just said what we meant.