Amerika

From a report on Hurricane Matthew, the unintentional hilarity of Western aid efforts:

The hurricane comes at a time when tens of thousands of people are still living in flimsy tents and makeshift dwellings in Haiti after a 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people.

Aid is like natural selection: whatever we encourage, we get more of. So when people are accustomed to the blithely nonsensical Great White Saviors showing up to administer aid and dump money on the place, they lose self-reliance in any form. And then, when a tragedy happens, they wait for someone else to clean up and make everything right.

Then again, most of the world is beyond our helping. They have chosen their lifestyles based on maximizing individual freedom and leisure, and no matter how much this appalls us, they seem content with the arrangement. Our finger-waggling, looking-down-the-nose judgment is just egomania disguised as compassion.

Tags: condescension, foreign aid, haiti, hurricane matthew