Tragedies on the scale of Haiti’s earthquake can leave us reeling, overwhelmed by too much information, and so much of it bad news. We can be left paralyzed. Technology has helped us more easily speed dollars to relief efforts but Haiti’s lack of infrastructure has made it difficult to supply that aid as quickly as the devastation there requires.

My friend, Kellie Walsh, is helping out by sorting through the noise to find some signal, by providing a Web site (thanks, WordPress) to document what’s happening as it happens so that context doesn’t get lost later when, as she puts it, “after the details and memories have grown hazy.”

Her site, Haiti Digital Bibliography, explains her aim, an important one in a world where we suffer not from too little information but too much.

In an effort to preserve a small slice of what happened and how the world responded in the days after the tragic earthquake … I’ve set up this site to compile a bibliography of digital resources about the event and its aftermath. Though a comprehensive list of all digital materials on the web would be impossible, I hope this currently random jumble of headlines can be organized into a bibliography that might later prove helpful to those who seek documentation and understanding of what happened in these frantic few days.

You can help her effort, contributing information and/or helping organize it. You can also donate money to various relief efforts. I’ve added links to three in the ad space throughout the Cosmic Sitcom, thanks to Kellie’s direction.

ABOVE Aerial photo of downtown Port au Prince, Haiti. Source: United Nations Development Program on Flickr.
Used under Creative Commons license.

I HOPE Jesus is nothing like the vindictive and ill-informed Christian broadcaster and one-time Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson, who makes the case that Haiti has suffered throughout its history because of a supposed “deal with the Devil” slaves made in order to defeat their French overlords. I love how Robertson neglects these tidbits of Haitian history:

• The U.S. played both sides in the slaves’ revolt against the French, giving supplies to both.
• The French, who under Robertson’s theory must’ve had God on their side since the Haitians had the Devil, violated a truce in order to kidnap the rebels’ leader and had him sent back to France where he died in prison from maltreatment. Way to go, Christians!
• In the 19th century, the U.S. obstructed substantive support to the newly freed nation of Haiti because slaveowners in the South didn’t want their own slaves to get any ideas about revolting. Southern whites lived in dread fear of having an independent black state so close to their shores.
• France tried repeatedly to take Haiti back by military force. Unsuccessfully. But their eventual peace agreement with Haiti required the country to pay France for its freedom, which Haiti could only do via high-interest loans happily given by the United States. It took Haiti until 1947 to pay back these loans.

Haiti’s poverty is directly linked to the shabby and opportunistic way the United States has treated that country. America needed an example to other blacks, especially its own slaves, of how they would be unable to govern themselves.

For more about Haiti’s sordid history, thanks to the U.S. and (naturally) France, you can read this illuminating retrospective from the Times Online (UK).