Talking Story 
by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V20, #4 (January 26, 2010), page 7.

There’s no way of any of us knowing. There’s no way we’d want to be there.

So when we hear about an awful tragedy like Haiti’s, when we see heart-stopping TV images of busy stores where chickens and cabbage once lay on shelves, homes where noisy families once lived and loved — collapsed and silenced — it’s probably best we just be humbled.

There’s not a thing to say. Bowed heads are about all any of us can do.

And whisper: Ampun’ilaah. May God have Mercy on them. On us.

In a minute or two though, as caring men and muscular women will do every time and everywhere, we get up and get to work. We think through how to help. To help those suffering families. Of course we do.

And when we think a moment more about Haiti, about that little island’s grinding poverty in a hemisphere of unprecedented human creativity and material prosperity, we can’t fail to see Haiti as a sobering state failure. A failed national apparatus. We know all about these derelicts. Asia’s got several notable ones, distinguishable from each other and from Haiti only by their bosses’ degrees of badness. Heads of these states range from the neglectful to the cannibal.

The incredible but unremarkable thing is: If you and me were to board a short boat ride, take a day trip out to little Haiti, we would likely see, in their grubby streets and in their humble homes, much of the same sociocultural success we have back home. Our common social systems are up and running despite our useless governments, despite our irrelevant formal economies, despite no one owning a lot of tangible hope for our kids’ futures. Futures not getting brighter. Not under those ugly leaders.

And after a morning of walking Haiti’s poor-poor streets, poorer still after January’s quake, you would likely get to wondering: Why isn’t it obvious to compassionate neighboring nations, to concerned world bankers, to responsive humanitarian organizations, which Haitian systems work and which ones won’t? Won’t work and don’t work to protect and provide for communities like Haiti. Like the Philippines or like Laos, like Burma or North Korea. Governing systems from clueless to criminal.

Human love bonds are resilient. Haitian familial systems work even though Haiti is made of children of African slavery. Kinship systems still nurture even though Imperial France trashed the place, leaving Haiti’s exhausted soil no reason for international commerce or trendy tourists to come by.

So if it’s obvious what’s working in Haiti and who’s robbing Haitians, why not immediately and directly aid families? Why not pump resources into Haiti’s resilient kinship systems? And ignore that dysfunctional governmental apparatus altogether.

Of course, the U.S. and the other wealthy nations managing our present economic order, are treaty signatories to international protocol requiring respect of national sovereignty — that is, the face and the place of heads of state, deserving and nasty alike. And naturally, no one wants to let loose the kind of chaos filling in the vacuum of taking out a strongman — not like what happened in our Southeast Asian neighborhood after brutal Imperial Japan pulled out. Not like what happened in Saddam’s authoritarian Iraq after he dashed. But this is not that.

This is not "regime change." This is simply recognizing around boardroom tables the necessity of two distinct and equally essential kinds of organizing principles present in every society, and reinforcing the starving system, the one stubbornly nurturing community. The one sans blue diplomatic suits and bristling security forces.

No need for overconcern for corrupt state systems, these guys’ll always take good care of themselves. And no harm will come to bad leaders or to those historically anchored conventions ensuring state sovereignty by setting out some stern minimal standards on acceptable sovereign conduct: Do these things, and you get your foreign aid. Don’t, and we swamp your society with compassion.

Maybe more to the point, a practical one, is the inefficiency of blindly protecting the notion of national sovereignty. At least the part about protecting a few awful kings. Extortion is expensive. And by the time patient wealthy nations have had enough of paying up, the cost of finally suspending a bad sovereign’s shield is very-very high.

I’ll bet that part of my 2002-2009 income fed into the ferocious destruction of Iraq’s formal structures, then committed to their reconstruction, then poured into crushing Iraq’s insurrections, then spent on dealing with Iraqi dislocation, emigration, and reintegration — that a slim fraction of this misadventure’s combined costs could just as well have handed every Haitian, Lao, Burmese, and North Korean household enough money to start a small business and the beginnings of a savings account to secure their children’s futures.

Neglecting street-level human systems in favor of dysfunctional official ones is really expensive. And in the end, wasteful. Better is making bad regimes and big financial institutions even less relevant than they are to ordinary people’s lives. Best is immediate aid for nurturing energetic neighborhoods and ambitious families.

This is not a radical notion.

Portland’s United Way, Oregon’s Boys and Girls Aid Society, the American Red Cross can each receive donations without asking local, state, or national governments first.

And this is not really news either. Millions of Asian-American dollars — same for Arab-American, African-American, and American-Latino remittances — go straight to struggling relatives back home the morning after our earth quakes, our rains fall, or monster storms pass. It goes hand to hand to hand in U.S. 20s, 50s, and 100 dollar bills. It gets there way ahead of international institutional relief.

You have to worry though, if our more efficient informal systems of care are actually enabling those more extravagant ones. Those crueller ones.

And you have to wonder what it is about all those top-heavy systems that keep their diplomats and bankers between us and where people live.

Worry and wonder aside, caring Americans, new and settled, soon enough get themselves to work.