A Little Bit Of Justice, Maybe

The two teens who carried out the brutal beatings of homeless men I posted about below have been caught. Here's your proverbial faces of evil:






















They sure as hell don't look like much, right.

Maybe the hardest part of this story for me was that one of the men beaten, Jacques Pierre, was a Haitian immigrant. I spent two years in the French West Indies, mostly amongst Haitian exile communities in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Haiti is the shame of the Western hemisphere, a nation of wonderful people that has been mis-ruled and used as a pawn for generations. The United States has invaded Haiti four times. Yet we've done almost no good, and often created active harm, as our thirty year support of the Duvaliers demonstrated.

Not to read too much into an individual criminal act (a trait I deplore) but I must say that this just brings it home for me how we've treated the most vulnerable population in our hemisphere.

With cruel indifference, punctuated by occasional bouts of brutal violence.