George Rebane

A dear friend in the LA area is building a new orphanage in Haiti.  He has always had a weak spot for children in general, and when exposed to the plight of some of Haiti’s little AIDS orphans he responded.  He joined with another friend and partner to found www.wecanbuildanorphanage.com.  Being a sucker for such pursuits, Jo Ann and I have become supporters of this ongoing act of compassion.

I am not trumpeting yet another charity that we support, but offering a candid and, perhaps, coarse examination of what could be argued as irresponsible behavior.  How so?  Well, that orphanage has been built in the middle of a dysfunctional culture and it will be totally dependent on the outside support that my friend is able to muster for it.  If ever he lets go, like so many similar efforts around the world, it will collapse.  The Haitian community cannot support it economically nor does it even see any necessity to keep it going.  The community’s job, it seems, is to continue supplying an endless stream of desperate toddlers for such an orphanage.

Haiti’s government is even a worse partner for sustaining any such enterprise, it being yet another strong-arm parasite whose only function is to suck lifeblood from its people without actually killing all of them.  Like most third world governments, they look at their people in the same way a cattle herder looks at his steers – they are an asset to be exploited.  With well-publicized pitiable populations, such governments exist only to act as gatekeepers for the inflow of compassionate money from the outside.  This money is skimmed to a trickle by the nation’s leaders and their bureaucratic minions.  They let enough reach the people so that the death rate is kept from becoming an obvious genocide.  Most such indigenous cultures are totally at peace with their leadership and have neither the will nor means to organize themselves to overthrow the leeches.

Major world organizations and NGOs – funded by rich country governments and private charities – often led by the UN, continue the charade of keeping such governments in place.  No one can answer the question, ‘And what sustainable alternatives do these people have that encourage them to undertake a sustainable path out of their misery?’  No one knows, so we continue to funnel funds through corrupt governments while assuring all through a thin veil of statesmanship that we’re doing all we can do.  This allows us to continue our charitable charades and get on with what is really important in our lives.  It’s a cheap and conscionable solution. With this ruse in place, we can forget about them. 

And into such black holes of hope private individuals and service organizations willingly leap with their own funds and energy.  A moment’s reason reveals that by almost any measure, such efforts will expand future suffering and death beyond what it would be if the current generation of sufferers are not succored to sexual maturity and adulthood.  Nevertheless, this is the road we will continue on unless the rich accept the dissemination of an ever growing fraction of their wealth to maintain today’s corrupt conduits through which to funnel marginal support for third world countries. 

Sooner or later it will all have to come to an end.  The only question is how many person-years of suffering must we fund before it all ends in wholesale death.  And, of course, in the interval these people don’t just sit and quietly suffer.  As would we, they resent their situation, and as part and parcel of their misery, they provide an ongoing supply of ignorant, malleable, vengeful, and willing youth to do the bidding of organizations dedicated to the destruction of the west.  In bygone days, distance and poor communications insulated us from such threats.  But today our deeply embedded and ever pervasive technology makes us vulnerable to their very existence.

So why does my friend put yet another orphanage into a hopeless morass, and why do people like me, capable of writing these words, go on supporting the growing tragedy.  Systems science terms such behavior as ‘greedy’ in that it provides immediate gratification without consideration of the larger and longer term consequences.  And greedy behavior by machine or man is an insane policy when it ultimately leads to self destruction.  Unless we also believe in a timely salvation from some higher plane, then with tears of compassion in our eyes, we who persevere in such charities are the truly insane.