BP is not the Holocust or Haiti

With much being said about the oil spill in the Gulf, I have heard some things that have left my heart a bit perplexed. A demonstrator in Lincoln who called the oil spill "a holocust." Activity on Facebook asking why the response in Haiti was so grand (on an international scale) but why the response to the oil spill has not been so great. While I certainly do not want to make a light of an environmental disaster with far reaching consequences, it is simply not fair to equate it to a genocide based holocust or a large scale humanitarian disaster in one of the poorest countries on earth.

I read two wonderfully sad and heartbreaking stories, taken from this Miami Herald article, today. They are wonderful because they remind us of the humanness of the earthquake. That it is not a dead bird but a dead girl. That where we are worried about industries like shrimping being harmed, we do not have any industries in our country that specialize in preparing dirt as a food source.

"We saw a woman selling dirt today. Dirt to eat. Walking downtown by the palace. Along Champs de Mars, which used to be a big open space but now is crammed tight with tents and tarps and cardboard and sheet-made homes pushed in to every scrap of bare ground. She was selling candy and crackers and dirt baked with salt and butter into small discs for eating."


"He pulled out a tiny picture, the size you get for school pictures of his beautiful little 8-year-old girl. She was out playing in the yard near a wall when the earthquake happened and the wall fell on her. He dug her out himself and she had already passed. He wanted to take her to the countryside to bury her and was trying to gather the money to arrange getting there. He waited three days, but after three days he could not wait any longer. So he had to wrap her carefully in a sheet and carry her into the street. Front-end loaders were coming through the streets to scoop up the bodies left on the curbs. He could not stand to leave her in the street to be scooped up by a machine. The only thing he could do was wrap her in a sheet and place her gently in the bucket of the front end loader himself -- to be driven away and buried in a mass grave."

And I just read the follow stats off of Troy Livesay's Twitter page: Haiti has 1,322 camps,with more than 10,000 tents and 564,000 tarpaulins covering more than a million people, accordng to migration officials .

May we not forget that while things like the BP oil spill are devestating, it is not the same as the issues associated with global poverty, true genocides or a disaster that kills 200, 000 and displaces over a million.