I don’t mean to be an unfeeling bastard

but on the other hand, maybe I do.

For two days we have been regaled in print and on screen with the disaster that is the Philippines after an historic megatyphoon strike.  People have no water, no food, no shelter, no…well, y’all can sing the words as well as I can.  We sang them nine years ago after the Sumatra earthquake, too.*

The next thing is undoubtedly a US carrier group showing up on the horizon to provide humanitarian relief.

But here’s what I don’t get.

For years and years and years, we have been pouring our hard-earned treasure toward the uplift of third-world countries.  Here is a perfect example — the Philippines, which at one time (and absent then-rampant prejudice regarding “our little brown brothers”) might have been considered for statehood, or at least permanent Puerto Rico-like commonwealth status.

In all that time, DID NOBODY EVER THINK TO STOCKPILE FOOD AND WATER FOR EMERGENCY RELIEF?  It’s not like a super typhoon doesn’t hit the Philippines on a regular basis.

I keep wondering if it is worth our trouble to keep pouring borrowed Chinese money into the hellholes of the world just to see it all go down the drain when a big wind comes or a volcano erupts or an earthquake hits.  At some point the rest of the world needs to learn to fish for itself rather than depend on the largesse of those of us who are now going to be paying for the fish they eat.

Foreign aid is a marvelous, humanitarian, beautiful concept that has done nothing but turn the majority of the world’s people into our dependents, who by and large hate us for it.  I do believe we should stop while we’re behind.

_____________________

* I’d say equally hard things about Katrina, but Louisiana is a US state, not a third world country, so the situation is a little different.