Where Is The Soul?

All these empty words. All these people, pretending like they care. It is to dampen their bad conscience, and their guilt, guilt for simply being alive, and in the eyes of some, having it all.
We are not willing to give up any of our own luxury. We have roof over our heads, food on the table, we have water available straight from our taps. In a perfect world that would be all we needed, but it isn't. We need our chocolate bars, our cigarettes, our movies. We imagine that shallow and material things will buy us happiness. Make the difference between surviving, and living.
Everything I've read so far of the Haiti earthquake proves this thesis. It doesn't matter how much money people decide to donate, sending text messages to certain donation numbers, or calling there during charity events. In the end the help is heartless, it has no soul. As well as most the articles of the disaster. The attempt to write in a solidary manner is so extensive that it falls flat, and becomes only mockery, ringing false. Where are the real portrayals? Where, among all the numbers of victims, charts over collapsed buildings, and Haitian history, are the human beings?
My co-worker said the other day what Darwin thought in his time - the strongest will survive. My co-worker's idea was to stop helping crisis countries with the argument that in time the strongest would remain, and the "weak" would have been sorted out of the equation. I'm reminded of the writer who wrote the ironic essay suggesting to eat infants in order to cure starvation. Where is the human being here? Where is the living and breathing person, with dreams of the world?
We are not the strongest. It was luck that we were born here. I doubt my co-worker would have the same arguments if he had been born in Haiti, or anywhere else where there is chaos, and where they need our help.
I understand that the world is over-populated. I understand that maybe, if you were utilitarian, you would argue to let some of them die. But that would break us. That would break everything we are and pretend to stand for. That would make us heartless. Perhaps the help that we give with our small donations, rarely more than we'd use on a single stop by the grocery store, is too little. Maybe it is to dampen our conscience, and maybe, many times, the help rings false. I can't decide which is worse - to completely ignore this crisis from the start, or give it tons of attention the first few weeks only to let it fall out of our minds and our medias when the first and worst part of the crisis is over. This is why it is false in my eyes. It is because scandals with famous people get more space in the papers than real news. Than news, that matter. Even if we can't help in any good way, then at least we should give it all our attention, and not look away as soon as it gets too painful.
The head of the Swedish Red Cross help organization holds a salary twice as high as the head of another similar organization, SOS Barnbyar (SOS Children's Villages). It would, as a reporter recently noted, be more accurate to announce "Text HELP to number XX, and we can pay our head's salary"; than to announce it will go to Haiti's earthquake victims. Where does our charity money really go?
Today the newspaper had an article about a radio station in Haiti which is now airing from the streets, after their studio was destroyed in the quake. While not many in Haiti are able to read, and even less own television sets; the radio has become a haven. Through this media people are told where they can find shelter, food and water. Through this media all official and semi-official announcements are recited for the people.
This is where the human beings are.
This is the soul.
POET IN THE JAR