By Bill Bradberry
He could fix anything. Dad would see something wrong; something broken or not quite working the way it was supposed to, and he’d fix it or at least he’d try.
Most often got the job done no matter how long it took, no matter how challenging the task, he’d scope it out, gather his tools and go to work, and he would work tirelessly until the job was done, the thing fixed, replaced or recycled but never discarded.
Growing up in an era where everyone was pretty much on their own, yet also dependent on each other, he and his peers had little choice but to count on themselves and whenever necessary, their neighbors; an ethic they derived from their agrarian roots, growing up on farms where there was always work to be done and improvisation was a required skill.
Without handbooks, and in many cases without the formal education necessary to read the books even if they had them, they had to figure things out for themselves but if someone did not know how to tackle a problem, there was usually a neighbor somewhere down the road who could. And they did.
When I arrived back in the sunshine state again recently, the entire peninsula was buried in a rare deep freeze reminding me of the legendary snowfall the state suffered back in 1977.
Of course, any temperature below 50 degrees in South Florida is considered as equivalent to below freezing among many except the hardiest, though others look forward to the infrequent chills and the momentary relief from the otherwise unforgiving sun and the ever-present drone of the air conditioners.
The local media was in a perpetual frenzy as worried farmers and citrus grove owners scurried to save their crops while panicked pet-owners and grief stricken gardeners dragged their precious plants indoors to protect them from the evil arctic blast. Naturally, I was blamed for bringing it down with me though I am certain several Canadians got there ahead of me.
There are probably as many Canadian license plates in Palm Beach County during the winter season as there are Canadian license plates on any given day at Walmart and the Fashion Outlets of Niagara Falls, Florida has figured out how to capitalize on that market in a big way and as a result scant evidence of the global recession is apparent there for the most part in spite of the otherwise obvious sharp drop in the once heavily bloated over-priced and over-abundant new housing market.
Within days of my arrival, the weather maelstrom was replaced by the shocking and devastating earthquake horror not far from the pristine sands of Palm Beach where, during the years that I lived there, flotillas of Haitian refugees were an almost daily occurrence, and just as quickly as they arrived, starving and sick from the harrowing journey, they were sent right back into the hell that Haiti had become.
I became deeply interested in the tiny overpopulated little country while I lived in South Florida. Having made many Haitian friends and acquaintances, I was thirsty for understanding why things were and are the way they remain only more so now.
There was obviously a problem, and I wanted to know what it was and how to fix it; a trait I must have inherited from dad.
Watching the news reports of the tragedy from the comfort of the living room was nothing like hearing the personal pleas from the people I know in Florida who have loved ones still trapped under the rubble there, just off the coast, seemingly within swimming distance from where we stood, many of us in tears feeling absolutely helpless except to pray for them.
I wondered how my father would have seen it; what tools would he gather, and how would he fix this?
I could almost hear him, “Get them out of there, all of them; evacuate the whole place, clean it up and rebuild it right!” he’d say. He’d be sending in the Army, the Marines, the Navy and pulling in forces from all over the region, making arrangements to accommodate the refugees while training them to reconstruct their country from the ground up.
He would admonish those who over the years exploited the country as Richard Kim, writing in The Nation posts, “Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor — by France, the U.S., Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.”
Kim continues, “As historians have documented, the impoverishment of Haiti began in the earliest decades of its independence, when Haiti’s slaves and free gens de couleur rallied to liberate the country from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was living under a new kind of bondage — external debt. In order to keep the French and other Western powers from enforcing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners (yes, that’s right, freed slaves were forced to compensate their former masters for their liberty). In order to do that, they borrowed millions from French banks and then from the US and Germany. As Alex von Tunzelmann pointed out, “By 1900, it (Haiti) was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments.”
No doubt, we live on a precarious, dynamic planet fraught with danger and the ever present threat of calamity; indeed the natural catastrophe that befell our Southern neighbor could, and will one day happen again even here, but the man made disaster could have been avoided and it must be resolved.
A nation that cannot help itself, cannot help its neighbors, and neighbors who exploit one another also imperil if not doom each other.
As my father would say, “Let’s get to the root of this problem and fix it!”
Contact Bill Bradberry at bill.bradberry@yahoo.com.
