is a phrase i’m tired of hearing right about now.
when natural disasters strike people often come together, an act of solidarity, to give what they can to people in need. last night i went to a benefit concert for haiti. and the response i’ve gotten from some people has been wild.
it seems like half of my acquaintanceship is obsessed with not supporting Haiti Benefit efforts because “no one did anything when Katrina happened.”
now i feel like— if you don’t want to donate to efforts like these, that is your call. that’s fine. it’s your money, do what you feel is right. but to complain at every mention of a cause because some totally separate event years before was mishandled— something you obviously didn’t contribute or pay attention to at the time, if you cannot remember all the celebrity donation drives on tv all the time— i mean— Kanye West’s famous statement happened on one of these televised events— in a nation of celebrity news, this should at least be some incentive to remember that catastrophe.
“Ok… So there were benefits but they were– like– way later… Huge delay. People totally didn’t care for a long time.”
ok, now katrina was a few years ago. my memory might be misleading me. maybe there was a huge delay in response. maybe no one cared for a really long time. i turned to google for help. the hurricane hit on august 29, 2005. this article (published on monday sept 5) describes a benefit concert (aaron neville, harry connick, faith hill) that happened on friday. that would be sept 2, 2005. yes? that’s pretty fast to put together a large scale event like that— all for the purpose of asking for money for victims? wow. and people “didn’t care” so much that one week later another huge benefit was broadcast— performers included sheryl crow, alicia keys, dixie chicks, paul simon, neil young, etc.
along with this assertion that hurricane katrina did nothing to spur people to hold benefits and supply aid is a notion that the response for the Haiti earthquake has not been any disaster. And– no one’s trying to forget Katrina was a disaster. But the fact is that aid on the ground in Haiti has not been swift getting to the people.
i think people may be forgetting that Katrina had a death toll of under 2000 people. Estimates of the deathtoll in Haiti? Last week they were hovering around 150,000.
come on people. you don’t have to donate if that’s what you feel. but there’s no need to deny the facts just to feel justified in doing it.




