Haiti Still Totally Fucked
I feel indebted to people with healthy attention spans. I feel indebted to people who are committed to following through on a train of thought and action guided by strong, humane principles. Without them, i'd essentially be just another dummy sitting around waiting for the next serving of infotainment to pass the time before i die.
So thankfully, we have people like Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow.org who has been compiling a detailed overview of where Haiti stands 6-months after we all watched Port-Au-Prince leveled by an earthquake and were momentarily moved to do something to help.
The bad news is of course, that almost none of the desperately needed aid money pledged by wealthy nations while the headlines and photo ops were in full swing has been paid to Haiti's reconstruction efforts, leaving the population living in nightmare conditions.
If the obvious horror of the human toll being exacted in Haiti by this negligence isn't enough to motivate us here in the First World to help, perhaps we should consider what kind of precedent it sets for the inevitable moment when the city/ province/ state in which we live becomes the epicenter for some over-the-top natural or human-made disaster. Will anyone be there to help us? Or will they just follow precedent and use it as a photo op and make pledges that will never be kept while our families suffer and die in squalor?
To be honest, that is the prime motivation behind any involvement i've ever had in anything to do with politics or activism or any garbage like that: if they can do it to those people, they can do it to me. To me, justice isn't about some liberal do-gooder nonsense, it's about self-preservation. i know it's boring compared to music and sports and movies and beer and irony and being clever and all that, but I believe it is in our best interests to pay attention and do something to help when other people are getting fucked over.
We still recommend financially supporting Partners In Health directly. Or if you're one of those people who just has to get something in return, you can make that same donation in exchange for a download of 3 fun songs recently recovered from our early records.
Speaking of sports, former NHL enforcer Georges Laraque and even current Canucks d-man Dan Hamhuis are encouraging people not too forget about Haiti, so as you can see, the two things don't have to be mutually exclusive.
In other news, fuck are you people going to get sonically slapped in the fucking face by our new stuff. haha.