In what shallow dream of comfort and safety can a man exist that he does not willingly replace a Haitian today, in a mind's eye, these interminable hours of agony and despair, heaped on suffering already, this ordeal? On crushing poverty falls crushing concrete. Concrete crushing limbs and lives already bent and broken in the task of labor without any hope that can be imagined by the comfortable, or even the uncomfortable, of a West that continues to ever forsake. Forsake and forswear is what we have done, to the detriment and now death.
Send the Marines and Airborne. They will, on their bare backs if needed, hump the water and rations up through the debris, up the shattered hills, up through fiercest of danger, past the need for any explanation except their hearts' rising, past the already fallen to feed and quench the people for whom the sentence would otherwise be death for no reason other than their history and their color. They will, in your name and for the private honor of their most sacred hearts.
The disgrace of Katrina is at our backs. The deadliness of both cold uncaring and white hot scald that came from our own Washington is over and done, a stain. The eight years in which we were enemies to global humanity are done. he time in which we used the power at our disposal to take, to harm, to bend and break the will of others is done. We, Americans, have the strength to carry, to cope, to encourage and to heal, all more powerful than any weapon, the power to teach the soaring humanity that is our heritage, but for our cowardice about the color of a man's skin. At times it seems the whole world knows this, hopes this about us, but for us.
The need is real, and the time is now. If not us, then who? If not now, then when? All asked and answered. We the People... command our own fate, and by that singular ability the fate of our world turns now and in the future, near and far. Haiti is a time to know the charity and courage of ones' soul.