I was perusing some posts on Twitter earlier today when I saw this picture, which had been re-tweeted 100 times before I passed it along, too. It was labeled as the best picture to come out of Haiti so far, and I couldn’t agree more.

Prior to last week’s unimaginable earthquake, two things always came to my mind when I thought of Haiti. The first was Alicia Silverstone in the movie Clueless saying that “we could certainly party with the Hati-ans” – an accidental mispronunciation that was ultimately left in the movie. The second was of religion. Growing up as a Catholic, I’d grown accustomed to hearing the phrase “…and our sister parish in Haiti” during Mass. While I’ve grown quite far from my Catholic upbringing (at least, as much as anyone can ever do such a thing) for personal reasons, that church – that sister parish – was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news.

I have found it virtually impossible to watch coverage of the immediate aftermath and the relief efforts, for the most part. While I feel that the public has a right to know what’s happening when it affects them and should be aware of what’s going on in the world, I realized on April 20, 1999, as news of the Columbine massacre ripped through the country, that the media is comprised of sharks. I can’t understand why they feel it’s necessary to show us pictures of dead bodies lying in the streets. I’m sure this happened before Columbine, but in the years since then (9/11, Katrina, etc.) it seems as though they have little or no respect for the dead or for the survivors. Their attempts to “shock” us with these images have not only contributed to paranoia, fear, and, ironically, mass desensitization (and they wonder why the youth of America are the way they are), but the act of showing those pictures is, itself, insensitive. I get that, unless we can actually see what is happening there, we really can’t understand what it’s like for those people. At the same time, putting cameras in their faces to publicize their suffering isn’t going to make it any better. Continue reading →