I have a rant about Haiti, but Ill reserve that one. Lets just say I had to study Haiti and I don't have the greatest amount of sympathy for Haiti.
In Soviet Russia, Haiti has no sympathy for you!
No but seriously, the personification of a country is pretty f'ed up. Of course, I do it too. E.g. I personify the U.S. as the devil, in my mind, as does a lot of the world. But a country isn't a person. A country is an assemblage of bureaucratic entities and accidental circumstances that is really beyond anyone's control. There is a lot of resentment on the part of some Native Americans towards the white person, especially in the older generations. Maybe they don't have a lot of sympathy for white America in the same way that AC doesn't have a lot of sympathy for Haiti? I dunno what AC's beef is with Haiti, but, in the end, I guess we all have an assemblage of prejudices and perceptions, both good and bad, about every country on the face of the earth, and for that matter every grouping... religious groups, corporate groups (both for-profit and non-profit,) geographic groups, racial groups, cultural groups.
Of course, does it make sense to personify even a person? E.g. should I say I don't have a lot of sympathy for Pat Robertson or that I do have a lot of sympathy for Martin Luther King? I mean, I'm sure that MLK and Robertson both have their good sides and their bad sides. They just responded to the circumstances they found themselves in. You can pick your nose at the ball park and if the camera feeding the jumbotron happens to be focused in on you at that precise moment, now all of a sudden you're known to the world for that one particular aspect of yourself.
So we maintain in our minds a complex (or simple?) set of rules for determining how and where and when and to what extent we hold someone 'responsible' for their own actions, and to what extent we give someone a pass, or a second or third chance, and we apply these rules unevenly to different people, including ourselves, based on prejudices and past experiences. So for me, Pat Robertson is evil, and Robertson is responsible for all the hate and decisiveness he spews forth into the world.
It's easy to hold prejudices like this, and it's convenient, and it's a necessary way of dealing with and interacting with the world. Robertson would no doubt give you the shirt off his back, but meanwhile, that shirt is infected with his own special germ warfare version of a plague of ignorance that surely will destroy, if not all of humanity, certainly great sections of it, so you have to have your guard up, to not be on the receiving end yourself, and to help save others from being on the receiving end as well.
Our ideas of how and where and when personal responsibility should apply are really rooted in culture. American culture tends to be fairly jingoistic and short-sighted... ethnocentric is the word... (Relative to most if not all other 1st world countries, anyway.) I'm more ready to give some impoverished third world African or Afro-Caribbean culture a pass on something as serious as, say, the genocide in Rwanda, than I am willing to give Nazi Germany a pass, or Nazi America a pass for it's various (debatably) lesser transgressions in more recent times. Why? Because our society is more structured, and has more resources, and so, in the parlance of personal responsibility, our society *ought to know better* more than some third world society.
Further, when you look at the writing of Dambisa Moyo on the subject of aid given to Africa, (_Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa_) or for that matter, when you look at the (progressive) literature on the subject of charity given to U.S. citizens right here on U.S. soil, what emerges is a picture of 1st world society as well intentioned, but like Pat Robertson, abso-fuck*ng-lutely insane and counter-productive. We have institutionalized poverty and dependence, and our 'chartiy,' while it does help some people to survive in the short term, which is certainly better than letting people die which wouldn't be very Christian, tends to render those people and those societies and individuals dependent on the charity in the long term. How ironic that the progressives are the ones who are more leading the way in more closely following the biblical parable of 'teaching a person to giraffe' than the conservatives whose thinking is steeped in religiously ideology.
So the danger of institutions, including religious institutions, is that they tend to be static and they tend to become fixed in their ideas, while meanwhile the real world tends to change and evolve, and new and better paradigms for understanding the dynamics of the real world are emerging... The best we can do as individuals is to try to avail ourselves of the best and brightest ideas that are out there, to try to incorporate these ideas into our own thinking, and to the extent that the tired old thinking of institutions and institutionalized culture and society permeates our personal thinking, to try to rid ourselves of this mind'set.'
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