Mud Cookies

I'm online today, on AOL catching up on my news. I open an article I'd read earlier on another site (way to be first AOL) about people in Haiti eating cookies made of dirt (which costs about $5 for enough dirt to make 100 cookies), oil, salt, and sugar, baking them outside in the blistering sun, and selling them for $0.05 or eating them. Dirt obviously can be "dirty" and eating it is a health hazard (though I pray the sun is killing at least some of the bacteria), but people have to because the price of food is too high for the average Haitian family.

My heart was as broken as it always is when I read things such as this and I was curious about how my fellow Americans felt about such an atrocity. Silly me. The vast majority of posts (of which there were over 900, and climbing) made fun of the article (I'm going to celebrate tonight with steak and lobster while they enjoy their dirt"), were extremely racist ("This is how every country run by blacks is, how is this new?"), or just plain stupid ("This is funny. Poor people suck"). These examples are very real posts by very real Americans and I am wondering how we can even claim to be a country at the top (which, let's face it, we lag behind on pretty much everything positive). How can we claim anything (The land of the free? The home of the brave?) when the common citizen feels this way about the world around them??

I'm so angry. I want to curse, fight, maim, kill. I don't understand the hate, the lack of compassion, empathy, sympathy, peace, anything in these monsters. I don't want to be like them but it is hard to try and live a life of peace when everyone else seems to enjoy chaos so much.

Underneath that anger is a fear that I have a problem admitting. The same fear people must face when they look in the eyes of someone who hates them for no reason. The fear in the hearts of men swinging from trees, women hiding their babies from masters who will sell them (even when they are the children of those masters), the fear Black men must feel when the lights and sirens go off behind them and they wonder "What did I do?", knowing that even nothing may be too much.

What is winning in a world like this one? How can you believe in God, in Love, in anything? Today is one of the days when I just feel like giving up. I don't understand this world.