Britannia Radio

Duly Noted: Lessons From Haiti

From the desk of George Handlery on Sat, 2010-01-23 12:32

George Handlery about the week that was. Crushing crises and the culture of improvisation. Close your eyes and the troubles are gone. Intellectuals and tyrannies: Persecution is a form of coveted recognition. Present perils and the downgrading of the Soviet threat. The ostrich-test.

1.Haiti. The tragedy behind the crisis will be hijacked to prove pet peeves. This writer’s perspective and experience is with war between men, and not with nature against man. From this personal perspective, the ability of the locals to improvise and to bear deserves recognition. People that live in the kind of perfected systems in which everything works as it is supposed to, are subject to two errors. One: They underestimate the ability of some societies to cope with unanticipable cataclysms. Second: They overestimate their own skills to cope with the kind of devastation that leads to a total collapse. Closely related to this is that advanced societies are skilled in the art of circumnavigating and avoiding turbulence. Nevertheless, some crises are unavoidable and the breakdown caused is inevitable. The earthquake would have severed the sinews that bind together optimally structured societies. Overall, the Haitians, conditioned as they were by their badly functioning system, coped well with the collapse of the state, the economy, the infrastructure, social institutions and the disappearance laws.

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