Today – with the mainstream media failing to adequately serve the public in many parts of the country, and with multitudes of people fed up with how corporate media manipulate the news – is an opportune time for independent media projects to be established or refocused. The question is, as always: how to get financial backing for the work?

I am profoundly skeptical about history: how we teach history and how we learn history. People imagine their place in the world on the basis of what has come before them and where – based on that trajectory – they are going.

We have a new biggest-box-office-hit-ever on our hands. More people have been recorded to have seen this movie than any other movie in history. Avatar is a story of an interaction between aliens and humans. In very general terms it can be said that the aliens are represented as good guys while humans represent the bad guys. This is not entirely true as the special few, led by a classical ‘hero’ figure, are both human and good.

Under the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson, who would subsequently be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the United States pursued the established policy of “stabilizing” the Caribbean under American control. In 1912, since neither Wilson nor his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, knew anything about Haiti, they asked John H Allen, the American manager of the Banque nationale in Port-au-Prince, to brief them. Bryan’s reaction to Allen’s description of Haiti was, “Dear me, think of it! Niggers speaking French.”

In the documentary The Inconvenient Truth, Gore advised citizens to recycle and buy gas-efficient cars. Inconvenient? How about shutting down most of the factories belching smoke around the world, which contribute little to global health? Or abandoning the high rise office buildings that require heating and cooling 24/7?

The CPCCA has been meeting since last fall. “What Coalition?” you may be asking yourselves. Exactly this entity has been almost totally out of the public eye since its inception. Few Canadians are aware of this committee whose main aim is, to quote one critic, “an attempt to curtail freedom of speech and academic freedom across Canada, and to possibly criminalize certain kinds of human rights discourse.”

Everyone likes to be on solid ground. But it’s amazing what you can get used to. In Delmas 33, where my friend Vilmond is living with a group of forty people who have come together to see each other through the crisis, people started laughing. Someone joked that he was getting used to the earth rocking him to sleep. “It’s so comforting,” he said.

Sometimes, Haitians refer to the earthquake as spektak la. It means not only “the show” or “the spectacle,” but also “the dramatic event.” Everywhere, people have been assigning meaning to the spektak in appreciation of their target audiences. Bill Clinton and the poor of Port-au-Prince are all discussing what the earthquake means to them in the context of their lives.

Look at the front page of the New York Times (Jan 17), and you’d swear that chaos and violence are running rampant in Haiti, that everyone from journalists to relief workers must be risking their necks just to venture out into the streets…

For a very brief historical moment, all Haitians in Port-au-Prince found themselves in the same boat. But when President Preval announced to his compatriots that he was a victim like everybody else, they shook their heads in disgust.