What Haiti should teach us

This article appears in the February 2010 issue of The Four Marks as an Op-Ed. For more information on The Four Marks, please click here.

Some time ago The Onion published a story, in its inimitable style, with (roughly) the following headline: “Sudanese warlords lay down weapons and sue for peace after seeing a picture of a Minnesotan high schooler wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Save Darfur’ on it.” If you don’t laugh at that, you probably should stop reading this.

Lampooning the point of “causes” or “awareness” The Onion was gently pointing out a fact that some of us already know: you can’t “care bear stare” a problem away. Being “aware” of worldwide problems is a failure in two respects: 1) You necessarily ignore your own local needs and problems, and 2) You don’t really contribute (because you aren’t really able to) substantive help.

It is a tale as old as time that even though “charity begins at home” we almost never believe or live that. My rather comfortable suburban town of Overland Park, Kansas, situated in affluent Johnson County, has an extraordinary amount of local charities. They include adoption agencies, battered women’s homes, places for runaway kids, food kitchens, homebuilders for low-income families, thrift stores galore, etc. There is any number of causes that you might find fascinating and that would love to have your help. But why don’t we give our time or our talent or our tithe? Because, as one of my friends put it in a comment to a facebook status update on Haiti, “people aren’t dying on the street.”

We are a very generous people in America: our charitable giving is about 2% of our GDP in any given year – more than any other nation. Generosity is blind. It precisely does not count the cost. But, in the wrong situations, generosity can kill. When the victims of concentration camps were first found by Allied soldiers, some of the poor wretched prisoners found death at the hands of the liberators: not by the bayonet, but by the water bottle. The GIs, anxious to help people who looked like husks of humans, gave them all the water and food these poor souls wanted, and these men, who had survived the horrors of these camps, died because their weakened organs couldn’t take the sudden surfeit of nutrition.

The same murder by generosity is going on right now in Haiti, and it is because we are tremendously uninformed as a people. (An aside: I’ve often tried to explain to friends and relatives who live outside the United States that if they lived in a country that was a six-hour flight coast-to-coast, you’d find local and national politics a lot more germane to your lives, especially because the US mainland has never suffered a real military invasion since we have become the nation we are today. We have a big enough country to fill our minds. This isn’t an excuse, just a mitigating explanation on behalf of my countrymen.) All that being said, most people don’t know that Haiti’s corrupt government has prepared it for this situation – or rather, prepared it to be unprepared. The earthquake has destroyed government offices, churches, private homes: it has left no one untouched. But, even had Haiti been hit with half the magnitude of the quake it was hit with, it is likely that the government would still have been powerless to help its people.

The instinct of tender-hearted Americans (remember Katrina? The Tsunami?) is to scream: “For God’s sake, DO something!” More often a nation of action and less one of thought (for better or worse) we’ve often been, in both war and peace, a shoot-first-ask-questions-later type of people. The problem is, Haiti is like that starved concentration camp prisoner. It is severely compromised in its governmental functions, there is basically no infrastructure, and there are dead everywhere. The 24-hour media, with no dead Michael Jacksons to talk about, excitedly rushes to the scene to send home scenes of horror, hour after hour after hour. Americans are rushing to donate in every way possible and yet we will likely help to cripple Haiti for decades to come, not because we aren’t generous, but because we are so clumsy with that generosity.

Americans, because they are mostly ignorant of the rest of the world and its politics and policies, don’t realize that in simply pouring in money (because that solves everything! Check out the bonuses paid at Goldman Sachs with our money!), we may be opening up all sorts of opportunities for the unscrupulous, who have already proven themselves quite capable of making Haiti completely unable to respond to a disaster. Even if I felt like I could somehow exonerate my fellow countrymen for this error in judgment, the 2004 Hurricane Katrina disaster would condemn them.

That disaster happened on our own soil (read Douglas Brinkley’s masterful The Great Deluge or watch Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke if you want to know what really happened before, during, and after). We had FEMA, the National Guard, Coast Guard, Navy, Army, Marines, thugs from Blackwater, et al. down there and through various failures of leadership and overloads of generosity, we witnessed the same suffering that is going on now in Haiti. Dead bodies, not lying out on roads, but floating in the water, where bacteria helped metastasize the problem, dominated news coverage. Rampant looting. Murders. Massive fraud happening through the Red Cross and other “charity” organizations that managed to use disaster for personal gain (if you do give money, have the common sense to give to someone other than the Red Cross, who has, in numerous situations around the world, been guilty of waste and fraud. Give it to charities that were there before the quake, and will be there long after the cameras, the Red Cross, and Slick Willy and W are gone). Sometimes “just do something!” is just plain wrong. Sometimes we have to sit, watch, pray, and (get this!) think about what we should do. A country that is never told “No” is utterly confounded by the idea that sometimes, you can’t solve a problem just by sending money, military forces, food, and water. That may indeed solve the problems of today, and of the next 6 months, and of the next year, but it will do very little to help the Haitian people, who likely will have another earthquake in our lifetime, and we will offer the same unthinking help we did this time. It’s hard for denizens of the so-called “indispensable nation” to think that there is actually a problem we can’t solve overnight: heck, you can get a tan in ten minutes; we should certainly be able to solve the problems of Haiti over a 7-10 night cycle of watching Anderson Cooper!

What Americans should remember the most is that Haiti is not like America, where 9 times out of 10, you can trust that where you send your money will be where it will be used, especially in the case of Wall Street bailouts: we know that our money will end up being spent in San Moritz, Davos, and Monte Carlo on wine, women, and song.

Ultimately there’s nothing wrong with contributing to help those in desperate need. I just think those people are a lot closer than the Caribbean. They are next door. They are in your city. And they’d love your help. You owe it to them. First, because you’re going to make a bigger difference in their lives than your donation won’t ever make in Haiti. Secondly, because whether we believe it or not, charity really does begin at home.

The Restoration VIII: Cell phones

This article originally appeared in the January 2010 issue of The Four Marks as part of a series called "The Restoration." "The Restoration" is a monthly column dedicated to restoring Christian ideals in our modern culture. For more information on The Four Marks, please click here.

When telephones were first invented in 1876, various newspapers proposed proper behaviors for the new invention. Among the myriad ideas put forward was one that admonished readers to dress properly when speaking on the telephone – the idea of talking to someone in pajamas was considered rude. The thought was that this would lead to a gradual diminishment of manners in general conversation. This suggestion might elicit a hearty laugh today, but would that we might have heeded the spirit of the message, if not necessarily the letter.

Fast forward more than a century, and the permutation of Mr. Bell’s original invention, i.e. cell phones, has become an intolerable nuisance in our daily lives. It invades every moment of our existence: cell phone conversations occur in bathrooms, airplanes, classrooms, churches, dorms, taxis, workplaces, cars, bedrooms, subways…you get my point. What is worse is that, given that we cannot turn our ears off, we overhear most of these conversations - conversations that are often representative of the nadir of our civilization:

“Hey, I’m on the bus.”
Response
“Yeah, how was your day?”
Response
“Oh me too, totally.”
Response
“Oh I agree. I can’t stand this weather.”
Response
“Man, I can’t wait for the weekend.”

Do I really need to continue? You’ve witnessed this many a time, and if you’re not willing to admit to such obviously crutch-like conversation making, I certainly can. We have replaced times of silence where reflection on our inner and outer lives might have made for more interesting conversation with an unending stream of insipid banality. God forbid we be alone with our thoughts without a cell phone or iPod. We might read, or write, or (gasp!) pray!

I’ve hesitated to write about this subject for some time because anything I’ve read regarding this matter seems to treat it with blithe ease or rather Luddite fear. But, as the new year is upon us, what is obvious to me is that “always on” communication is harmful to society and to the soul. So, it’s time to push back.

Firstly, let’s make sure we understand the key differences between real communication and virtual communication.

Real communication

Examples: Family dinners, going out with friends, handwritten letters

Characteristics

*tied to a place
*allows for subtlety, subtext, body language
*demands (even if it doesn’t always receive) deliberation and manners

Virtual communication

Examples: Facebook, Twitter, texting, cell phone conversations

Characteristics

*occurs anywhere
*using subtlety is difficult or esoteric
*tends towards pedestrian topics

Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for virtual communication. We can’t run from technology. But I do say, as someone who uses Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging, that there is a time and a place for everything, and it’s high time that we, cell phones, and cell phone companies learned that.

As you may consider the New Year a good occasion to try new things, let me propose the following countermeasures against cell phones, countermeasures that I, as one of the guilty, will be implementing, with the following two general principles in place first:

General Principle #1: You are not that important. The President is not going to call. Your boss is not going to call. Neither your mother nor your mother-in-law is going to call. If they call and don’t reach you, they will simply have to endure what every President, boss, mother, or mother-in-law has had to endure in the thousands of years of civilization before the advent of cell phones: waiting.

General Principle #2: You are not at home. You are vomiting out your private thoughts and information in a public forum without consideration for the fact that most of us don’t care to hear about your private life. There was a terribly funny comedy bit some time ago (google “comedian yells into cell phone” for the video) which featured a man carrying an oversized cell phone and screaming banal details into the phone, like, “Hello! No, I’m at a concert! NO, A CONCERT!” The looks on people’s faces who were subjected to this funny-because-it’s-true bit were absolutely priceless. Just think, the next time you answer your phone in public: do I need to subject others to this, and for how long?

Recommendations

1. Cell phones must be turned off during family meals. I would say that the regular telephone, if such an anachronism still exists, should be put off the hook during this time. That way it cannot ring or go to the answering machine. When friends tell you later that it was busy for an hour (gasp!) you can tell them that during your family meals you take the phone off the hook. Then wait for the response. It should be interesting.

2. Cell phones should be turned off during all meals, period. For most people who live outside the drive-thru society that America perpetuates, meal times are a time to rest, recuperate, enjoy, and recharge, on the way back to work (Americans, please read Leon Kass’ The Hungry Soul to re-learn how to eat.). For goodness’ sake, you are at a table with live people. Would you abandon them to attend to the virtual? The unbelievable decline in manners that allows for a solid 1/3 of my Rotary Club (including myself), which has an average of 59, to be checking their cell phones during our weekly meeting is astonishing. Those businessmen who claim self-importance – I would again refer you to General Principle #1 above and assure you that though I have only had a business for six years, I know that it is completely possible to be away from the phone periodically throughout the day. I promise you will not die, your business will not explode, and the earth will keep rotating. Just keep repeating that for a while and you might believe it.

3. Cell phones must be turned off at the movies. Why are you in a movie if not to relax – and how does interrupting your movie to text, “Hey, I’m in a movie – ttyl” help your relaxation? In addition, your bright screen is inconsiderate to others.

4. Cell phones don’t need to be used .0007 seconds after your airplane’s wheels touch down. Yes, we all know you are here. Yes, we know you are carrying your luggage. Yes, we know you didn’t sleep. Yes, I know I sound like Andy Rooney right now, but if you must, please use text messaging and leave the rest of us alone.

5. Cell phones must be turned off at Mass. This is without exception and I’m not going to bother with an explanation why.

6. Cell phones must be turned off at night. If you cry the wolf of “emergency” then get an “emergency” line – be it a prepaid cell phone or a landline, leave it on all the time, and give the number to 2-3 people who can be trusted to understand the meaning of the word “emergency.” If you cry “but I use it for my alarm” please feel free to write me. I will send you an inexpensive, fully functional alarm clock free of charge if you promise to turn off your cell phone at night.

7. Cell phones must be turned off in class. Especially by athletes who are on scholarship. Hey, we know you're bored, but can you show some respect for the professor and for your fellow students? What the heck are you paying for if not to get an education? If you are paying to have text conversations with your friends, good luck finding a job. You already aren't hungry enough.

In short, we should take control of our technology. Why is it that most people are on the leash of their cell phones instead of vice versa? These countermeasures proposed above, while effective separately, used together will constitute a surge that will work, not because Fox News mendaciously says so, but because you will be, in various occasions and opportunities, pushing back on a device that doesn’t ever tell you “No” (well, perhaps when the batteries die).

When you use your phone less you will realize it is not attached to your body. When you realize it’s not attached to your body, you will realize you don’t need a cell phone to live. When you realize you don’t need a cell phone to live, you just might get on with real living.

(Phone powers down).

Poetry Project VI: "The Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot

This is the sixth installment of the occasional poetry series. The analysis is written by Bishop Richard Williamson. You may find the others here on TrueRestoration.blogspot.com. If you are interested in specifically Catholic poetry by a contemporary author, you might consider picking up Fr. Lawrence Smith's We Call Thee Blessed, a collection of Marian sonnets.

After giving due deference to the birthplace of English poetry, I persuaded the Bishop to look at an American poet, T.S. Eliot (I will gently ignore the fact that T.S. Eliot relocated to England later in life - but it might indicate where his heart really lay, and perhaps, where all good English poetry ultimately comes from). We chose a poem fit for the season of Epiphany. You should read the poem, linked here, before reading the analysis.

As the apostasy of the nations in modern times takes the whole world further and further away from God, so there are ever fewer artists and writers who have kept any sense of the things of the human spirit. All that matters henceforth is things material, which is why poetry is widely despised, and serious art, literature and music are all dying or dead. In this land of the blind, the American-born poet, dramatist and critic, T.S.Eliot (1888-1965) is a seer, but his well-known poem, “Journey of the Magi”, shows how he too lost one eye in his struggle with the modern wasteland.

That struggle is reflected in the main event of his life: his move at the age of 26 from the United States where he was born and bred, to England where he was based for the remainder of his life, hardly re-visiting the land of his birth. He once said that while his poetry represented a combination of his being born in the USA with his staying in England, nevertheless “in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.” Surely what he meant was that the problem set for him in his early years by the materialism of modern civilisation remained the driving force of his writing, like the grain of sand by its irritation generates the pearl in the oyster, but it was his move back from the New World to the Old that enabled him to get a handle on the problem, and to express in his poetry an at least partial solution.

But the spiritual problem set by the mass of men giving themselves over to materialism runs deep, and that is why many of Eliot’s poems are not easy to understand. He would say that poetry in modern times “has to be difficult”, meaning no doubt that if it is easy, it can hardly be true to the world around us. Thus his first published poems, written around the time of the first World War, already so broke with the century-old tradition of Keatsian romanticism that they were accused by some critics of not being poetry at all ! See for instance in the “Journey” how there are no rhymes at all, nor regular length of lines, nor regular rhythm.

Yet it is enough to read the poem aloud to appreciate the approximate four beats to a line which do make the “Journey” a poem, as opposed to mere prose. The comparison with Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” is interesting. Observably Arnold is already (1851) loosening classical poetic discipline as to rhyme and rhythm, and Eliot loosens it still further. But Eliot does still have discipline. Alas, successors of Eliot can pretend to be following him when they have no discipline at all !

However, if one stops to think about it, old-fashioned rhymes would be too pretty for the problematic monologue of Eliot’s Magus (singular of the Latin plural “Magi”), whose modernity in search of the Christ Child requires a re-working of the Gospel story, found in Matthew II, 1-12. Then the three Magi, or astrologers, Kings from the East, followed a miraculous star over a long distance to pay homage and bring precious gifts to the new-born King of Kings, still a little child in the arms of his blessed Mother. Now we have in Eliot’s “Journey” an old man (line 32) recalling from long ago neither star, nor gifts, nor Mother, but in the poem’s three sections only the painful travelling (l.1-20), the arrival (l. 21-31) and the huge question of what it all meant (l. 32-43). Eliot’s is no Christmas card poem, nor short cut to comfort !

The poem’s first section (1-20), easy enough to understand, recreates the physical discomfort of the long journey from the East to Bethlehem, not mentioned. Nor does Eliot suggest there were any of the spiritual consolations that no doubt sustained the three original Magi on their historic journey. On the contrary (l.19,20), their modern successor has only the voices singing in his ears to tell him that he is crazy to be making such a journey.

The poem’s middle section (l.21-31) is less easy to understand. As the journey draws to its close, so the scenery has more warmth and life (21,22). In the next six lines (23-28), the “three trees” evoke the three crosses on Calvary while the “pieces of silver” evoke Judas Iscariot. All other details, e.g. the stream, mill, horse, tavern and wineskins, no doubt had a particular significance for Eliot himself, so that they are somehow suggestive, but of exactly what, it is difficult to say. Together they create a surreal scene which serves as transition from the material discomfort of the first section to the mysterious discomfort of the last section, for (28-31) our modern Magus is not necessarily happy to have arrived at his destination – “you may say” the place was “satisfactory”, he himself seems not so sure…

Indeed, in the poem’s third section (32-43) the old man is sure that the journey was worth the trouble (32,33), but it left him nevertheless with a huge question mark (35-39): how could a scene of birth, the scene of a new-born child, have left him at the same time with such a sensation of death, of “hard and bitter agony” (39) ? Because when the Magus got back to his kingdom (40), he found he could no longer live as he had lived before. He found his own people now “alien” to him, clutching hold of the pagan gods of his old way of life, which could no longer satisfy him, because after meeting the Child he could no longer be a pagan. But he had gone through no rebirth of his own into any new dispensation, so that the whole experience felt only like death. In conclusion (43), he would not be unhappy to die.

Contrast the story of the Magi as told by St Matthew. The Magi make the journey, full of faith that the star will lead them to the Child they mean to adore. It disappears when they visit the court of the treacherous Herod, but when it appears to them again on their way to Bethlehem, “they rejoiced with exceeding great joy” (v.10). It stands to reason that their faith and perseverance were rewarded by the divine Child with a flood of light and joy. They died as Saints, and their sacred relics are honoured to this day in the great Cathedral of Cologne which is dedicated to them.

Why then does our modern poet present such a different version of their journey to find Christ ? Because he does not have the faith of the original three Kings. Experts in the life and works of T.S.Eliot are unanimous that the “Journey of the Magi” is a largely autobiographical poem, having been published in August of 1927, just two months after Eliot had converted at 39 years of age to Anglicanism (Episcopalianism in the USA). Let us illustrate the poem by the life.

Eliot had begun life immersed in the “old dispensation” of Protestant Mid-west America (188-1906), Calvinist Harvard (1906-1910; 1911-1914) and liberal Oxford (1914-1915) which he quit after a year – “It’s pretty”, he said, “but I don’t like to be dead”. In 1915 he made an unfortunate marriage which caused him untold stress until (and after) he and his wife separated in 1933. From 1917 to 1925 he worked in a London bank, during which penitential time he published in 1922 what was no doubt the single most influential poem in English of the entire 20th century, “The Wasteland”.

In this poem Eliot could not have given expression to so much of the disorder of an “old dispensation” dying unless he had sensed that disorder, and he could not have sensed that disorder had he not had within him a considerable sense of the order that was missing. This sense of that order he had from the past and its masters. The “Wasteland” is steeped in quotations from them, notably Dante and Shakespeare, Eliot’s two favourites. Scratching his way back to the source of their order, Eliot nearly converted to Catholicism, but he stopped short at Anglicanism, partly because of Pius XI’s controversial condemnation in 1926 of “Action Francaise”, partly because Eliot wished to remain loyal to the country of his adoption. Five months after joining the Anglican Church he took out British citizenship.

This was the same year in which he published “Journey”, and now we can understand why Eliot’s Magus was so lacking in joy. Full marks to Eliot for not contenting himself with the plentiful delights of the disintegrating West (l.10); full marks for persevering on the journey towards Christ (l.33); full marks for never again being “at ease” in the “old dispensation”; but – mystery of grace and free-will – Eliot never made it all the way to Christ in his one true Church, and that is surely why his Magus never “rejoiced with exceeding great joy”.

Yet “God writes straight with crooked lines”. Many readers today immerse themselves in Eliot and feed on his poetry because it grapples with, and grasps, their dying dispensation, without imposing on them any of the demands of Christ’s dispensation. In this way Eliot must have served as at least a first step towards order and salvation for many souls who might not have gone near him had he made himself openly and fully a “Papist”. The same applies to a number of writers and artists who combine a grasp of modern disorder with a more or less disguised conveyance of the values of Christian order. If we should be grateful for small mercies, we should certainly be grateful for a large mercy like the poems of T.S. Eliot even if they are not always easy.