Nicholas Eberstadt offers a lengthy report on the terrible situation that is Haiti. His article is heart-wrenching and eye-opening. Eberstadt's concluding paragraphs read as follows:
What do we--the fortunate souls holding U.S. passports, with warm beds and hot meals awaiting us--come home learning from a brief fact-finding sojourn to Haiti? In a sentence: Security comes first. First in the hierarchy of human
needs. First in the prerequisites for economic progress. . . Without security, efforts to better the national plight will be doomed to frustration, or worse. Foreign economic assistance will be mainly wasted, or worse. Humanitarian assistance efforts will find themselves on an endless treadmill. Economic and humanitarian assistance are no substitute for security and safety--cannot substitute for it, cannot themselves create it. And what holds for Haiti holds just as true for other tortured regions of the world where governments receive foreign aid, but local populations do not receive safety.