I know not many of you follow one of my favourite authors, Poppy Z. Brite, but I subscribe to both her LiveJournal and Twitter feeds. Brite has lived in New Orleans for most of her adult life, and was among those who lost their homes when the gulf coast levees failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She’s quick to point out that the levee failures, not the storm itself, was what caused most of the destruction, and it’s hard not to agree with that assessment. She also points out, quite frequently, that that part of the country has yet to really recover from the destruction of four and a half years ago. If you remember back to last August, when President Obama visited the stricken areas, the news networks covered him as he visited areas and gave speeches and pledged support.

Therein lies the problem. When the cameras shut off and the news went back to tea party protests and the like, nearly everyone, once again, forgot how the people of Louisiana still need help. I will shamefully admit to being one of those people; reading Brite’s posts and tweets about the damage and need for help does remind me, but within minutes I forget about it and go on with the rest of my life. I have my own needs to meet, and it isn’t always easy to balance that with being aware of those who are less fortunate than I am. It’s a problem that many of you deal with as well, I’m sure; we can’t all be Mother Teresa, but at the same time we wish we could do a better job of taking care of others.

However, I think our culture deserves a lot of the blame for this. It should go without saying that most American news outlets spend too much time talking about the latest celebrity gossip, particularly from reality television shows, and too little time talking about the rest of the world and what’s going on outside of our borders. If it’s out of sight, then it’s out of mind, and certainly there are those out there who like it that way, because it enables them to put so much more focus on "real problems" like stopping same-sex marriages and reducing taxes on millionaires. Most people in this country probably hadn’t given more than a passing thought about Haiti since the United States’ military presence in the 1990s departed, and it’s only now, in the wake of the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, that we’re drawn to Haiti again.

As the news reports coming out of Haiti this past week have made clear, the economic and infrastructure problems in Haiti were legion well before the earthquake hit, and Haiti’s impoverishment in comparison to other Western countries was so enormous that it demanded much more attention than it got. Given how little attention was paid to how disaster-stricken Haiti was even before this earthquake, it’s no wonder that this news comes as such a shock to so many people; quite honestly, I should have known better. As with Hurricane Katrina, there was no way to prevent every death, but if money had been spent on making the region as disaster-proof as reasonably possible, maybe we wouldn’t have so many piles of corpses on our screens and in our heads.

The question now is whether we’ll remember the problems in Haiti after the news cameras leave and the nightly news goes back to covering the latest celebrity sex scandal, or we’ll just go back to not thinking about those less fortunate than us because we’re not confronted with the images of them like we are right now. I’m going to try to remember the people of Haiti long after the wall-to-wall news coverage ends, but I know that I’ll probably get caught up in the vagaries of my own life at some point and won’t keep them, or the people of Louisiana, in mind as much I should. I just wish the American news media would do the role they’re supposed to do and spend more time covering the injustice in this world, and less time on the trivia of celebrity drama. It shouldn’t have taken this earthquake to get them, or us, to pay close attention to the problems in Haiti. Those problems don’t go away when the news cameras shut off.