If You Were Down to Your Last Dollar…

I saw it on the news three days ago. How the people from Haiti resorted to eating mud cookies made out of dirt, vegetable shortening and salt because they couldn’t afford anything else.

I knew I had to write about it because if I didn’t, I’d think about it for weeks. And it isn’t because I’m like you, I don’t pretend to sympathise and feel pangs of shame for having to throw out my leftovers simply because I always put more food on my plate than I could finish. Why do you people even bother to pretend to care when we all know the next day you’re going to forget all about it and resume to waste away food?

There was another sort of response as well. I remember one particularly well because it was the reason I had to write this entry. The guy said it was the Haitians’ fault for breeding. Now they have more mouths than they could feed. He went on further to say that if they wanted to have sex, they should have had the common sense to use condoms.

Congratulations, idiot. Nice to know that even wealth couldn’t buy you brains.

These people resorted to eating dirt because they couldn’t afford proper food. You think that if they had a dollar they’d buy condoms over wheat? Or any other forms of contraceptions for that matter?

If you were so poor that you had to eat mud cookies three times a day, do you think you’d go to school? Even if you did go to school, would you have been able to concentrate? So these people wouldn’t know about the ovulation cycle or anything like that, would they? You wouldn’t blame them if someone told them they couldn’t get pregnant by having sex in certain positions, right? Because in the US, where money is not huge issue (at least not as huge as it is in Haiti) and where the teens are supposedly ‘educated’, unwanted pregnancies still happen. I still know teens who believe you can’t get pregnant if you’re having sex during your period even after attending Sex Education classes.

“Why do these idiots breed? Why do they have sex in the first place?” asks Idiot #2.

If you were so poor, that you couldn’t even afford to buy proper clothes and therefore had to resort to wearing tattered clothes that unintentionally tend to turn on the opposite sex, is it abnormal that you and your husband should want to have sex and unintentionally breed? If you’re uneducated, chances of getting a job are scarce, there’s basically nothing around you (remember, there isn’t even anything to eat except for dirt), don’t you think you would have turn to the person closest to you and have sex? Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. What else would you have done, sit around and commiserate? Feel sorry for yourself? I find it totally understandable that these people, given their current situation, feel sad and try to comfort each other, which of course leads to…well, sex.

Don’t even bother talking about abstinence. I know tons of educated minds who have a problem practicing that, so don’t even get me started on uneducated ones.

The Haitians evoke less sympathy because well, simply because they aren’t white. I mean, come on. People showed more concern when Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan were running around looking anorexic. They even formed a ‘Save Lohan’ group. I bet if there were blue eyed white kids who were suffering from this sort of poverty, I’ll bet you their pictures would be on the cover of National Geographic every month. Presses would be all over their stories. They’d be so overfed after getting all that publicity that they’d have to be on an Obesity Watch. Remember John Grisham’s ‘A Time to Kill’?