‘The international language of what a real free life is’

By Amanda Painter

A few days ago Redemption Song by Bob Marley came on the radio and I found myself almost in tears. I’ve always loved the song, but recent urges toward certain personal evolutions were resonating with the line, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.” It was a timely reminder that whatever help I may get from astrology or friends and lovers, ultimately I’m the one who has to do the work. Having help just… helps. Sometimes a lot.

The experience got lost in the shuffle of the weekend until just yesterday. I was listening to Democracy Now! on the radio as Amy Goodman interviewed Sean Penn in Haiti (he has been managing a tent camp of 55,000 there for five or six months) and during the break, they played a few seconds of a Haitian artist named BelO covering the song. I found myself noticing the wider implications of the song in this context: it has been six months since that huge earthquake devastated this island nation born of the slave trade; a nation enslaved to poverty and now physical destruction as well.

I listened to Sean Penn compare an American’s frustration with the slowness of an energy-saving light bulb with a Haitian’s joy at simply having electric light, as well as the strength that has necessarily come from their having had to make do with so very little for so very long. Yes, there are many forms of mental slavery. For many of us it’s easy to forget just how much we really are capable of in the midst of comfort.

True, most of us do not have a Hollywood star’s bank account and connections at our disposal to co-found our own non-profit organization so effectively. But we here reading on the internet do have the power to reach out, share news, remind our friends that everything is not “back to normal” in Haiti, and that the aim needs to be for “better than normal” given what normal was before the earthquake.

I think this snippet from the rush transcript gives some sense of where to aim:

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned the factories that would be set up because Haitians want jobs. There is concern that they could be setting up maquiladoras [Mexican factories near the US border that use US materials and lower-wage Mexican workers to produce products sold back to the US]. Yes they’re desperate for jobs, but at any price? How do you guard against that?

SEAN PENN: Not at any price. I think that -– your being here, and anytime there’s media and responsible media here, it’s virtually more important than any aid organization’s presence at all. With that alone, the people in the United States would get to know Haitian people and send the money right into their hands. They’d adopt neighborhoods, they’d adopt schools. So, in terms of what the future is going to be, if we are just going to continue a culture of people making $1- $2 a day, spending 45% of their annual income for their children’s education, because they care that much. To have their children educated but with only access to substandard education. If that doesn’t change, it’s only a pipe dream. People are going to have a life, they are going to have to share in the international language of what a real free life is. And we can’t maintain a “We’re grateful for a penny” aspect simply… in what becomes the kind of systemic punishment for people’s strength. And that’s what happens in a place like Haiti where comfort has never been felt on any real level. There’s no expectation or feeling for a right to it. But it isn’t a luxury, it’s the human way.

It’s a powerful interview; I think Amy devoted most of the hour-long show to it. I really cannot do it justice by summing it up and the rush transcript contains typos and missing punctuation that can make reading it a little confusing, so I would encourage you to click here and listen.

Hearing Penn is quite compelling as he compares the laughable high school-style back-biting of the film industry with its deadly version in the NGO world of disaster relief. He calls it “passive murder” and describes a frantic race to save 15-year-old child with diphtheria (a disease inoculated against here) four months after the quake, only to fail due to a lack of coordination in setting up infrastructure. He praises the US military for doing a great job in the efforts they were involved with: showing efficiency, competency and a depth of hands-on caring and humanity apparently absent with the UN “relief” forces. And he goes on to express a fear that the Army’s and National Guard’s successes could be for naught if relief efforts do not step up as they need to, with hurricane season here. Penn challenges BP to send a little money toward Haiti since they seems to have so much to play with and since planned trips for some aid workers have been canceled due to promised monies “drying up” or being diverted. To me, it was an unsettling reminder that if sea life in the Gulf is destroyed as much as we fear it will be, this island nation will have one more blow to stagger back from. The connections between all of these events and systems run quite deep.

It has been six whole months since we were in the midst of that “winter whirl“ as Eric described the astrology when the earthquake hit Haiti, with its own pair of eclipses and a couple of fierce planetary retrogrades. A lot has changed since then; much is about the same for many. There are parallels between the winter and now, since we just came through the summer set of eclipses with their fancy grand cross. To be sure things are shifting within and without for all of us. Some may have felt the metaphysical tectonics dramatically; personally, I think most of the movement has been subtle for me. But there have been a couple of moments when I think I’ve managed to break a link or two in those mental chains. Maybe it will just take a few months for the full effects of the shifts I have made to manifest.

I’m hoping those effects will look more like Amy Goodman keeping the alt-media spotlight on Haiti or Sean Penn committing to the cause for the long haul and less like the fatal discovery of a lacking infrastructure in a critical moment. And I’m hoping that writing and doing this work will in some way help in both Haiti’s emancipation and my own.