Please tell me that you missed me, or haven’t you noticed that I’ve been gone?

The last time I wrote, Haiti had just been devastated by a series of major earthquakes. At that time, no one seemed able to quickly do what the world community most wanted, to help the poor and wounded and homeless people of that tortured country.

There is still much to be done. In fact, real recovery is just beginning, and things are looking up for Haiti. Most importantly of all, President Bill Clinton pledged to focus the next three years of his life on rebuilding the country. Throughout next year, the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, headed by Clinton, will oversee the rebuilding dollars pledged by many nations. Additionally, on the last day of June, came the news that several large monetary funds were forgiving $1.2 Billion dollars of Haiti’s debt. That means $50 million more can now be used to help the poverty stricken nation.
While not writing about Haiti and other local and national issues, I have been writing, fiercely, trying to finish my memoir. It has a name and a publisher now. PoliPoint Press will be publishing Never in my Wildest Dreams. More… in fact lots more… on that in the future.

What bought me back to my computer was last Monday’s big dust-up with former Georgia director of rural development Shirley Sherrod, or rather it was the web conversations that started and continue, and deserve to be noted.
Many thoughtful people have taken this incident as a Teaching Moment, whatever that means. From the multitude of postings I’ve read, it was Sunday’s piece in the Washington Post by Michelle Singletary that turned the conversation for me. Add a line from last Wednesday’s column by Michael Gerson, who was President George W. Bush’s favorite speechwriter, and maybe something important has happened, something deserving of letting this story live a little longer.

You would have had to be out of the country not to know the story, but in summary, Shirley Sherrod was speaking at the National Convention of the NAACP. She made a speech about racial reconciliation. It was later edited by a right wing blogger and exploited by the Fox News network to make it appear she had been making racist remarks about white farmers. Sherrod was immediately fired. The NAACP affirmed that it did not endorse racism by anyone before investigating to see if that was the case here. The White House joined in the condemnation, also before investigating; and, until people like Country music star Willie Nelson, who has known Sherrod for 25 years, rose to her defense, a long life of service had been smeared, and was about to be destroyed.

Now one week later, the truth is out; her boss, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and President Obama have apologized and asked her to come back to work. She hasn’t decided yet whether she will or not.
That’s all old news. The new conversation started by Singletary advises us to hear Sherrod out; that this story is not about race, but about economic inequality, and that raises the bar. The columnist points out that the number of people who believe they are among the have–nots has doubled from 17 percent in 1988 to 34 percent in 2007.

Numerous studies have confirmed the widening gap between the rich and poor in America. Sherrod said that while working with white farmers, she realized that the social war we’ve been having isn’t about race, but economic inequity. In her speech, she said, “it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t, you know. And they could be black; and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people—those who don’t have access the way others have”. She told her NAACP audience, “The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it’s health care or whatever it is, they’ll do what they need to do to keep that power, you know. It’s always about money…”.

If we look at the two most recent notorious cases of media used to crush liberal voices, the victims had been involved in work that would help the poor to improve their lot: ACORN, the organization that fought for better wages and housing for the poor; and local activist Van Jones and his work to build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Unflattering stories burned through conservative web blogs and were then taken to national exposure and scathing attacks by the FOX News network.

The same pattern was followed here, except this time there was real videotape of the speech before it was doctored and the manipulation was exposed.


Michael Gerson pointed out in a thoughtful piece, “Signs of Sanity from the Tea Party”, that “there is a serious danger when evidence of ideological aggression is both easily falsified and universally distributed.”.
It will be interesting to see if this incident and the conversations that have followed will do anything to change the way we approach these kinds of explosive issues. Better yet, will the real subject of Shirley Sherrod’s speech become part of our national conversation?

Finally back to Shirley Sherrod. In the 1970’s, Sherrod and her husband ran a farming cooperative. They were part of a group that charged the Department of Agriculture with discrimination and won a settlement of over $1 Billion. Following that experience, she came to realize that the real battle is between the well off and those with less. During these times of high unemployment and bad economic news for the masses, it would be good to listen to Shirley Sherrod and to talk more about the economic divide which has no color lines.

Haiti: The day after: visible from the highway

Anyone who has ever been to Haiti probably found it very hard to sleep on Tuesday night.

Even under normal circumstances, life is unbelievably difficult on the island; it is hard to imagine that any more pain and suffering could be possible. But there it was: late Tuesday afternoon, a massive 7.0 earthquake struck near the capital city, Port-au Prince, wiping out power and communication lines. Darkness came too soon, making rescues even more difficult.

In the poorest nation of the Western hemisphere, there are no “first responders”, no rescue teams, no fire fighters, little heavy equipment capable of digging survivors from the rubble. If help came to survivors in the dark of night, it was from a family member or friend who answered their cries and tried to extricate them from the debris, often with nothing more than bare hands.

Daniel Morel, via Twitter

Woman buried in rubble after 7.0 earthquake, Port-au-Prince, Haiti

The majority of Haitians who live in the capital city of Port-au-Prince are profoundly poor. Over a million live in shantytowns on the edge of the city. Eighty-seven percent live in such deep poverty that finding food is a daily struggle and clean water is a luxury. This is a country where poor mothers feed mud pies to their hungry babies to fill their empty little stomachs. In light of this level of poverty, the fact that daily life in Haiti proceeds with any orderliness stems from the resilience, strength and will of the people — that, and the presence of missionaries, relief organizations and UN peacekeepers. 

It has been many years since I was in Haiti. Its history of struggle against the odds, and the talents of its many artists, drew me to this island nation. It became the place where I accepted the limitations of my own ability to tolerate abject poverty, or to alleviate the suffering of its victims. We had parked our car near the Iron Market. It was hot and too crowded, so I decided to stay in the car alone while the rest of our group shopped. Within minutes, the car was surrounded by faces pressing on the windows, through the front, back and both sides of the car. These were the faces of mothers whose babies appeared to be merely bundles of skin, bone and rags, of old people with all kinds of ailments, their haggard faces begging for whatever could be gotten. In my locked car, in the teeming heat, surrounded by all those begging faces, I cried and trembled alone behind the locked doors.

It wasn’t until years later, in Egypt, while riding from the airport to the center of Cairo, that I understood what I had done, what so many of us do when forced to look into the faces of people in extreme poverty. We concentrate our attention on the beautiful views and try not to look down. 

That day in Cairo, the car was traveling on a very high, elevated roadway which afforded sparkling views of the city as we sped along. The views were so thrilling that it took a while before I looked down from my perch and saw the teeming crowd of people below. In just one glance, I saw hundreds of ragged people, gathered in a crowded, rundown sector of the city, while people with plenty, people like me, sailed past on the sky bridge overhead. The way that road was designed, a tourist could complete an entire visit to the pyramids without having had any contact with the poor Egyptians surrounding them — without even seeing them. 

For decades, that’s the way it has been with Haiti. Most of the developed world seems to have been traveling past on an elevated bridge, riding high above Haiti, never looking down to see the impoverished masses below. But this time, with the Obama administration pledging its unwavering commitment of assistance, with the full attention of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband, UN Special Envoy to Haiti, former President Bill Clinton, and with the eyes of the world focused on this desperate situation, let’s hope the people of Haiti can finally be seen eye-to-eye, face-to-face.

This time, with so much damage and so much suffering, it is time for the world to reach down and lift them up.

Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle online edition The Gate.