Gongol.com Archives: May 2025
May 19, 2025
In a deeply unsettling dispatch from Haiti, a Sky News team reports that 90% of Port-au-Prince has fallen into lawlessness in the hands of heavily-armed gangs. This has displaced perhaps a million people, forcing them out of their homes and into camps where the struggle to subsist is heartbreaking. ■ No child deserves to be entrapped by such chaos, and no decent parent would want to bring them up under those conditions if any alternative were available. Those fairly uncontestable points should prick the conscience of any alert onlooker. Most religious people have been urged to bring peace into the world, and most of the strictly secular probably feel a similar moral compulsion, too. ■ But it's hard to know how to contribute to peace in a place so far away. It's a challenge without an easy answer. But it can start with at least a gentle acknowledgment that many people would choose to flee, and doing so in no way makes them criminals -- they are victims seeking refuge from the criminal violence that makes it impossible to live safely at home. ■ Haiti is a country of more than 11 million people -- bigger than North Carolina. Troubles that chronic in a place that big don't just fade away without help from the outside. There are serious and prudential discussions to be had on what forms that help should take, but there are real, innocent lives at stake, and we should take interest in our hemispheric neighbors.
