Almost as damning in Huber’s mind was my claim to solidarity in the struggle for equal rights. “Horowitz says he earned the right to talk to blacks ‘honestly,’” Huber wrote, “because of the ’60s. Personally, I don’t care how many marches he went to, how much money he dropped in a civil rights bucket, how many times he sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ with guest celebrities; Horowitz is not black, and he has no right to tell me or any other person of color how to pursue issues pertaining to our communities.”

This attitude is not original with Huber but will be familiar to anyone who has engaged black Americans over issues of race in recent decades. “If you don’t walk in my shoes, you can’t feel my pain.” The conclusion that is supposed to follow from this observation is usually presented as self-evident: “If you can’t feel my pain, you can’t tell me how I should deal with it.”

This was indeed the text of many a political sermon when objections were raised to the “Million Man March” because it was organized and led by the blatant anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.

“Don’t tell us what leaders to choose or what marches to join,” was the response of many otherwise sensible black commentators. It was a “black thing.” A matter of community pride. “We’re not listening when white people tell us what to do anymore — we’re not letting you choose our leaders.”

Indeed, marching behind an unpalatable figure like Farrakhan was seen in and of itself as a way of emphasizing black independence.

A similar attitude was apparent during the O.J. Simpson affair, when black leaders showed not the slightest embarrassment at the fact that African-American communities all over the nation, in a demonstration of striking insensitivity, cheered Simpson’s acquittal.

Imagine the reaction of black leaders if white communities had cheered the release of a white defendant accused of murdering his black wife and a black stranger, particularly if the white defendant was confronted by overwhelming circumstantial and DNA evidence, and had a record of beating his black spouse prior to her death.

A triumphal response to the acquittal in such a case would have been taken as evidence of racism. But in the Simpson affair the response of the African-American community was: We don’t care what you think or what you feel. We know what we feel and that is all that matters. If our response is insensitive, so what? We are going to be the judges of what is right or wrong for us, and no one — least of all any white — is going to tell us how to behave.

Imagine if the colors had been reversed!

This cold-hearted calculus is a central theme of what is now generously described as “black separatism.” It is an attitude that is already widespread in the African-American community, and is apparently on the rise.

A recent poll by the NAACP found that over 40 percent of blacks and 50 percent of whites now accept the doctrine of racially separate but equal. This is not terribly surprising, given that most of the “liberal” institutions in our culture have given their blessing to the idea. Whites have their own segregationist impulses, of course, but the license that the black leadership has given to separatism among the educated classes has had a real impact.

Perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of inattention, whites have been willing to go along with what the African-American community wants in these matters, without regard to their own standards of what is appropriate, moral or good.

So, if blacks want to march behind a kook like Farrakhan, fine. If they want racially segregated graduations and racially segregated dormitories and racially specific curricula in our schools, fine. If they want to bring back the segregationist standard of “separate but equal” anywhere in our national life, that must be all right as well.

As we divide along racial lines and increasingly surrender the ability to speak with a communal voice, however, we are losing something far more profound, and that is the fundamental idea of what it means to be American. This is the idea that all men — regardless of race, color or creed — are created equal, and are equal before the community’s law.

The founders did not say “white” men. The modifiers “black” and “white” do not appear in the Constitution. The founders did not say “all Americans are created equal” or all Christians or all Europeans. They said “all” without qualification.

(The fact that they used the common generic term “men” obviously did not mean just the male gender either. The Constitution not only does not specifically exclude women from its Bill of Rights, it does not use the words “male” or “female” at all.)

Not only is the concept of separatism antithetical to the American idea, it undermines the moral ideal that has helped liberate blacks from their former state of oppression. If the white majority could not feel blacks’ pain, they would not have responded as they did to the injustices their ancestors inflicted, which brought many whites inherited material advantages.

It is, of course, not just whites who cannot feel blacks’ pain in the sense implied in the statements above. The fact is, if we are going to be epistemologically precise, nobody can feel anybody else’s pain but their own. This paradox is a timeless theme of Western philosophy going back to Descartes, who believed that the only reality that is certain is the interior knowledge we have of our own feelings and thoughts.

Cogito ergo sum.

But this solipsistic viewpoint, and the relativist perspective that follows, would — if taken to its logical extreme — mean the end of any real possibility that a multiethnic or multicultural society like ours could triumph over the essential anarchy that is the human condition.

How can any morality exist if you have to actually be in another’s shoes to feel their pain? How can we know that slavery is wrong, if we have not been slaves? That discrimination is wrong if we have not been discriminated against?

How can we feel compelled to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, if there is no commonality between us? Yet the very idea of that kinship in our common humanity is what motivated Wilberforce and other Christians to end the slave trade that blacks and Arabs had started. How could they (or we) know or feel that an injustice had been done to others if those others are so alien that we cannot identify with them?

Or take this a step further: How can blacks presume to tell whites what is right or wrong for them — which is after all what the entire civil rights discourse has been about in this country — if being different disqualifies anyone from making such statements? How can blacks appeal to the conscience of whites in seeking to be treated as equals, if the very concept of common humanity that underpins the principle of equality is rejected by them?

The bottom line is this: How can blacks expect justice from whites, if whites cannot expect it from blacks? If one group cannot imagine what it is like to be the other, what is it that they are appealing to in each other when they ask for justice and respect?

“There, but for the grace of God, go I,” is the fundamental ethical intuition. If we cannot imagine ourselves in the place of another, what sympathy can we have for them? What kinship can we feel? How can we regard them as brothers and sisters under the skin?

We can’t. And that is the problem that those who employ the separatist argument must confront.

There is admittedly at least a kernel of truth in the separatist complaint. Life experiences are different and differences can be important. Existential differences undoubtedly form the basis of many intellectual disagreements, and provide the ground of our pluralistic identity. But the basis of our American identity is an injunction to accept these differences in order to overcome them: e pluribus unum. Out of many cultures and many ethnicities, one.

If I show care for you, I probably have the capacity to empathize with your experience and understand who you are. It is your ability to recognize this, and to listen to me as a friend (as well as my ability to listen to you) that forms the basis of our ability to coexist with each other in a democratic framework. If you ignore me and my concerns, on the other hand, you invite a similar response from me.

Taking this a step further, if you show hostility to me I probably am not going to care as much about you as I may have, and I might even be tempted to reciprocate that feeling of hostility. A significant amount of the hostility anyone experiences is often self-induced. The hostility that black separatism projects toward non-blacks is, not surprisingly, a proximate cause of the lack of sympathy that is often returned.

In recent decades, there has been a palpable decline in the sympathy that other Americans feel for the agendas of the civil rights movement. It should be evident that this is directly related to the growth of separatist feelings and ideas in the African-American community, and the perversion of the communal civil rights movement into separatist agendas.

The civil-rights movement Martin Luther King Jr. led was based on the old ethics and the old integrationist philosophy. It was supported by 90 percent majorities in the Congress and the overwhelming majority of the white population.

The same cannot be said for the “civil rights” policies of the current African-American leadership. Racial preferences, which are considered the sine qua non of a civil rights loyalty these days, are rejected by almost as large majorities among non-African-Americans as had supported the original civil rights agenda proposed by King.

Recognizing this fact, African-Americans have to ask themselves whether this is the result of racist attitudes on the part of whites or whether it is a failure of their own leadership to articulate worthy agendas.

If Alice Huber and Jack White want to call someone as committed to civil rights issues as I am a “racist” because I disagree with their assessment of some racial grievances, they must bear responsibility for the decreasing power of the term itself. In fact, the term “racism” has lost a great deal of its sting in recent decades through its abusive use by separatist demagogues.

If White, a prime offender in these matters, had written his slander for the Village Voice or the Amsterdam News, no one would have paid any attention or cared. The reason is that those institutions have so abused the term, by applying it frivolously to political opponents, that few people find their rhetoric credible anymore. It is only the authority of Time that gives White’s slanders their weight. If Time continues to publish racial rants like his, its own credibility will diminish.

Drawing inspiration from the separatist ideas of Malcolm X, the present leaders of the African-American community have squandered the moral capital that Martin Luther King Jr. accumulated, and thereby undermined the civil rights cause they claim to support.

Ask yourself which current African-American civil rights leader has any significant respect among communities that are not black or politically leftist? Certainly not Kweisi Mfume, Julian Bond or Jesse Jackson, whose moral authority among most Americans remains virtually nil.

Under this kind of “leadership” the African-American community is in danger of isolating itself and reviving its own segregation, a somber thought indeed. That is a lesson to ponder, and not only for Alice Huber and Jack White.

And we the ogling people drink it in.

Like any X-rated content, this smut is all flesh and no substantive plot. The lens flits between body parts and journalists pulling perverse Cronkite-in-Vietnam impressions (at one point, CNN showed Cooper and his T-shirt saving a child). But there is little discussion of how western Hispaniola was a man-made disaster before an earthquake made it a natural one.

Though neighboring the planet’s wealthiest nation, Haiti has long been one of the world’s poorest places. It sports 80 percent unemployment and a GDP smaller than the annual executive bonus fund at a single Wall Street bank. The destitution is tragic — and a reflection, in part, of colonial domination.

For much of the last two centuries, Western powers used embargo threats to force the country’s population of erstwhile slaves to reimburse their former European masters for lost “property.” As Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates recounts, America aided these efforts from the beginning because President Thomas Jefferson feared a successful black republic would “inspire slave insurrections throughout the American South.”

Crushed by this oppression, Haiti was then assaulted in the 1990s by American “free” trade policies that destroyed its agriculture economy and tried to turn the country into the world’s sweatshop. In recent years, as the menace of Western-backed coups lurked, Haiti has at times been compelled to pay more interest on its debt than it received in foreign aid.

This is the real story of Haiti that the black T-shirts and safari button-downs (and, alas, their viewers) have never cared about. They’ve only noticed the country when a cataclysm provided more telegenic images than the daily death and despair of the island’s pre-earthquake squalor.

Even now, as the casualty count rises, disaster pornographers barely mention the macabre history. They know that doing so would break unspoken rules against holding up a foreign policy mirror to America and against riling the politicians and business interests that contributed to Haiti’s demise.

Rather than reporting on what made Haiti so poor and therefore its infrastructure so susceptible to collapse, we get clips of Haitians momentarily cheering “USA!” as food packages trickle into their devastated capital. Rather than inquiries about how poverty made Haiti so ill-prepared for rescue operations, the disaster pornographers instead obediently follow George W. Bush, who self-servingly says, “You’ve got to deal with the desperation and there ought to be no politicization of that.”

“Politicization” — so that’s the safe-for-TV euphemism they’re using these days, huh? Evidently, it must be avoided — evidently, nothing kills an audience’s heaving passion faster than “politics” or (God forbid) contextualized news.

Anything like that — anything beyond the exploitation of raw disaster porn — well, it might ruin the money shot. 

This means a grand tour of sorts of Hispaniola, the island shared in an east-west split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, whose capitals we’ll be stopping in. The border between these nations is one of the few international demarcations clearly visible from 30,000 feet — the latter’s green tropical carpet abutting a Haitian deathscape of denuded hillsides the color of sawdust. You could argue that Hispaniola is perhaps the least glamorous landfall in the Caribbean. But you can’t beat the weather and the on-board pineapple tray.

With nothing else to do I wander the Port-au-Prince apron. Behind our dormant freighter a row of scarred, treeless hills bakes in the noon heat, raped for charcoal by millions of hungry Haitians. In front of the terminal, men ride past on donkeys and women balance baskets atop their heads. Somebody has started a cooking fire on the sidewalk. Haiti is the poorest country in the entire Western Hemisphere, and the squalor along the airport perimeter is at least as distressing as anything I’ve seen in Africa.

And, how to say this, it smells. If you’ve ever been to the tropics, maybe you’ll understand: It’s not a bad or foul smell, necessarily, and this isn’t to be taken as some Ugly American pejorative of things foreign or other-skinned. But it’s pungent. For those who live with changing seasons, it’s like the smell of a neighbor’s fireplace or wood stove on the first cold night of the year. Except it has no season; it’s simply always there, ceaseless and permeating like the heat of the Sahara or the numbness of a glacier. It’s the odor of rain forests burned, of foliage, charcoal and garbage incinerated — these destructive, ubiquitous pastimes of the Third World — and it hits you the second you step from an airplane in almost every latitudinally challenged republic on earth.

I notice a pallet of large white drums being unloaded from our airplane. Something doesn’t look right — crew member intuition — and, concerned that we’d accidentally transported some hazardous material, I ask a loader if he knows what the barrels contain. A forklift carries them to a corner of a ramshackle warehouse, and the driver pries off one of the heavy plastic lids.

What’s revealed is a tangled white mass of what appears to be string cheese floating in dirty water. A vague, quiveringly rotten smell rises from the liquid. The driver sticks in his hand and gives the ugly congealment a churn. “For sausage,” he answers. What we’re looking at, it turns out, is a barrel full of intestines — casings to be stuffed with meat at some horrible Haitian factory. Why the casings need to be imported while the meat itself is apparently on hand, I can’t say, but somebody found it necessary to pay the shipping costs and customs duties to fly 400 gallons of intestines from Miami to Port-au-Prince.

Thirty-three minutes away is Santo Domingo, the filth-and-stucco capital of the Dominican Republic — or the D.R., as savvy travelers and baseball announcers love to call it. The neighborhoods around the airport are some of the poorest on the island, and we’re two days on the heels of a terrible storm. Most of the roofs are missing, and as our jet drops its tires and aims for the runway at Las Américas International, we look straight into the islanders’ concrete-block lives, their belongings violently mingled: plastic bags, rain-soaked clothes, corrugated tin. And in all directions are the triangular, tornado-shaped plumes of garbage fires.

What it lacks in glamour, maybe, Santo Domingo makes up for in history. This is the oldest capital in the New World. With some time to kill, I hire a taxi, this time with no resistance. I’m going to see Christopher Columbus, who died in Spain but whose remains, depending which historian you believe, are interred beneath the cathedral here.

To me there’s something about that name, Santo Domingo, that evokes images of 15th-century explorers, their gray-sailed ships anchored offshore. To others, maybe, it’s thoughts of the slave trade, of indigenous islanders keeling over from those special European gifts of smallpox and typhus. Or boats taking cannonballs through their hulls, bars of gold falling to the ocean floor.

As with every big capital down here, the whiteness of the skyline is striking. White paint is splashed over everything: hotels, apartment blocks, schools. From the highway it looms ahead, clusters of white buildings set against brilliant blue beachfront; against emerald hillsides; against the mushrooming, oil-black storm clouds. And as the taxi brings me closer, I taste and feel that tropical force of humanity and heat — a grimy ooze through every white crack.

Later, in darkness, we’re loading up for the leg home, as it were, to Miami. They’ve unloaded our pallets of automobile parts and tractor tires — tools that will help turn the landscape of this small country into parking lots and strip malls like the rest of the world — and soon we’ll be gone.

I’m in a foul mood, and our captain is a retired Air Force pilot who’s boring us to tears with embellished stories: adventures of earthquakes in Pakistan, crash landings in the Kenyan countryside. He’s old and his face is wrinkled and it makes me miserable to hear him, because who cares, really, about his stories, now that he’s just some old retired serviceman with three ex-wives who’s lost all his hair? And I feel myself, like a disease, turning into the next version of this guy.

I’m tired and I need a shower. I’ve got grease on my shirt. From the metal railing I see the moon. It’s an odd, eerily dangling crescent surrounded by an inky redness, like the moon of the Turkish flag. There’s something wild and strange about it.

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Reports by news outlets have stated that emergency efforts in Haiti have been hampered because the Port-au-Prince airport’s radar was knocked out. Can planes take off or land with no air traffic control radar?

First of all, so that everyone understands, “radar” is a somewhat generic term that can mean different things, the same basic technology used for different purposes. We have cockpit radar, for instance, which is used by crews to detect storms and precipitation. But in this context we’re talking about air traffic control (ATC) radar, which allows controllers to monitor the position, speed and altitude of flights, sequencing them appropriately. There are radar facilities for the higher, en route sectors of airspace, as well as local, or “terminal,” facilities that manage traffic coming and going from particular airports.

But while it might sound primitive, all around the world you will find airports, as well as large swaths of en route airspace, lacking radar coverage. Over the oceans, for example, and in much of Africa. Or at Port-au-Prince. It had no radar even before the earthquake.

Lack of radar means that flights are sequenced “manually” through the use of position reports. Planes on oceanic crossings are spaced by time and altitude along paths or longitude and latitude, sending periodic position reports to distant ATC facilities. In and around airports themselves, controllers handling arrivals and departures will often ask crews for updates on their exact bearing and distance to a particular radio beacon or point-in-space fix, as well as their altitudes, and space them accordingly. Holding patterns are sometimes assigned when multiple flights are inbound, and instructions to turn, climb or descend will sometimes be referenced to fixes, distances or radials. A takeoff clearance might include the following:

“Air Haiti 209, cleared for takeoff. Maintain runway heading until passing 3,000 feet, then turn right on course. Maintain 5,000 feet until passing the 340 radial from the PAP VOR.” Occasionally with climbs or descents there’s a time restriction: “Cleared to climb from level one-three zero to level two-four zero by time one-six four-five. Report reaching. Time now one-six three-five.” In other words, “You’ve got 10 minutes to climb from 13,000 feet to 24,000 feet, and let us know as soon as you get there.”

It sounds old-fashioned — and it is — but it works pretty well, albeit at a much slower pace than at radar-equipped airports. Luckily, if not necessarily, traffic tends to be light at most non-radar airports.

The congestion problem at Port-au-Prince isn’t about radar being “knocked out” (it wasn’t there in the first place), but rather the sudden influx of humanitarian flights into airspace — and tarmac space — that is normally uncrowded. Up to 200 aircraft a day have been arriving at Toussaint Louverture International, with some stacked in holding patterns for 90 minutes or more. At one point all inbound flights from the U.S. were “ground stopped” due to saturation on and around the airport.

In addition, the Port-au-Prince control tower was badly damaged, requiring U.S. military personnel to set up a temporary facility. The media was conflating the terms “control tower” and “radar.” Although tower controllers will use radar, if available, they are not the same things. The loss of the tower, from which aircraft are cleared to taxi, take off and land, was a much more critical issue than a lack of radar it never had.

Speaking of the media, I also heard a CNN reporter describe the Port-au-Prince airport rather emphatically as “tiny.” Not sure what that was about. While it might lack the room for dozens of military transport jets, it’s pretty spacious by Caribbean standards. It has a 10,000-foot runway and a wide rectangular apron.

There is no such thing as “Air Haiti,” by the way. Years ago a small company with that name existed, but today Haiti is one of relatively few countries around the world lacking a national airline. Two others in the region that jump to mind are Guyana and Belize.

As far as earthquakes go, I keep getting asked what might happen if a runway starts shaking just as a jet is taking off or landing. I really don’t know. It depends, I guess, on the severity of the shaking and the speed of the plane. I don’t know what a magnitude 7 temblor feels like, but suffice it to say things would get bumpy. Probably not bumpy enough, however, to damage anything, as aircraft are designed to withstand some pretty severe jolts. As we know, it’s not the shaking of the ground that kills and injures people, but rather buildings falling on top of them. Overall, a plane is probably a pretty safe place to be — much safer than a building.

A runway coming apart is another story. Striking a fissure at high speed would be dangerous — albeit statistically unlikely. I am not aware of anything like that ever happening, although the 1974 disaster film “Earthquake” features a scene where a 707 touches down just as a major temblor hits Los Angeles. The runway fractures and the crew executes a go-around just in the nick of time.

The last scheduled passenger flight to leave Port-au-Prince after the quake was an American Airlines flight to Miami. Presumably the crew ensured that runway conditions were safe. This would have been done by taxiing along the surface, and/or by sending a vehicle out to assess things.

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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.

Nevertheless, you can’t say “Travolta” without adding “outspoken Scientologist,” and that, inevitably, is where the story gets murky. Because along with all those desperately needed supplies that the dude graciously hauled down there, Travolta also packed something else – a phalanx of Scientology ministers.

This isn’t the first time a high-profile member of L. Ron Hubbard’s religion has rushed to the scene of disaster. Tom Cruise deployed himself to New York City after the 9/11 attacks — and eventually used his mission there as an opportunity to call the Environmental Protection Agency a bunch of “liars”  for their cleanup efforts. Scientology stayed on to help create the auspicious-sounding New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, treating firefighters who’d survived the attacks – and their lingering physical effects — through a “purification” program with no scientific credibility and for which some firefighters allegedly were asked to fork over as much as 5 grand. That’s why people get a little creeped out when Scientologists come to the rescue.

And knowing that when Travolta made a similarly swift and generous gesture toward the people of New Orleans after Katrina, the church similarly hustled off to the Gulf Coast to counsel survivors, one gets a sense that the shell-shocked victims of January’s quakes may be in for at the very least some old-fashioned Thetan dogma.

A U.N. spokeswoman told the Associated Press last week that at least 800 relief planes have been on a waiting list to get in to Haiti, which can only handle about 130 flights a day.  So when Travolta told reporters, “We have the ability to actually help make a difference in the situation in Haiti and I just can’t see not using this plane to help,” it’s hard to believe the impulse is coming from anything but a truly decent and altruistic place. (It also makes one wonder how he swung it.)

But missionary work almost always comes with a mix of well-intentioned altruism and occasionally flat-out troubling proselytizing. And spreading good works can also mean spreading some dubious philosophies — along with some troubling “cures.” And it’ll be interesting to see what Scientology, which has long been associated with celebrities who can afford the high cost of becoming “clear” will do in a country that was already the poorest in the Western hemisphere before an incalculable disaster.

The bottom line is, unless you’ve personally flown four tons of supplies to Haiti today, John Travolta has done more for its people and their immediate, life-or-death needs than you or I have or ever will.  It also doesn’t change that hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck sense of dread that come from watching a gift bestowed with what sure look like a whole pack of yellow-shirted “volunteer minister” strings attached. 

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer — his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I’ve seen I’m not convinced.

What Would You Do?

Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.

By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.

So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid any time soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.

The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they’re people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven’t shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn’t mean anything now.

If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?

Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?

It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.

If Words Could Kill

We need to banish the word “looting” from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.

“Loot,” the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out “At one time loot was the soldier’s pay.” It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers’ pockets and as imperial seizures.

After years of interviewing survivors of disasters and reading firsthand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.

Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it’s usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don’t need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word “panic” wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control — the American military calls it “security” — rather than relief. A British-accented voice-over on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a “stampede” and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.

Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti’s dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they’ve never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that’s theft, but I’m not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.

In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it’s not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.

A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I’ve heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.

A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.

Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services — like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina — to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn’t label that looting.

Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing … Well, you catch my drift.

Woody Guthrie once sang that “some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don’t end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected — or appointed — office.

Learning to See in Crises

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I’m making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse — food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment — might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.” It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hog-tying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”

For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”

That one might not be totally accurate, but it’s likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

At the dawn of the millennium, three catastrophes were forecast for the United States: terrorists in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco with her earthquake kit and is about to make her seventh trip to New Orleans since Katrina. Her latest book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” is a testament to human bravery and innovation during disasters.

These would be tragic losses under normal circumstances, but they are even more so considering the vulnerable state of Haiti’s women in the wake of this catastrophe; they could use these activists’ help like never before. In memory of this admirable humanitarian trio, I’ll leave you with a video clip of Democracy Now’s tribute to Merlet.