Haiti is half of Hispaniola. For that matter did the Domonican Republic get affected?

Nowhere near as close as Haiti. Really, we're fine, and we're sending all the help we can get to our neighbors. I've never seen so many dominicans collaborate to help Haiti.

Former NBA journeyman Paul Shirley says he's not donating a 'cent' to Haiti earthquake relief.

NBA players were outraged Wednesday by anti-Haitian statements issued by former league player Paul Shirley.

"I haven't donated a cent to the Haitian relief effort. And I probably will not," said Shirley, who was a seldom-used reserve forward in 2004-05 on Mike D'Antoni's Phoenix Suns team. "I don't think the people of Haiti will do much with my money either.

"... Shouldn't much of the responsibility for the disaster lie with the victims of that disaster?"

Shirley also penned a sarcastic letter of thanks to the Haitian people that read, in part: "Kudos on developing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Your commitment to human rights, infrastructure and birth control should be applauded."

ESPN Wednesday fired Shirley from his gig as a freelance commentator. The network released a brief statement saying that Shirley's views "do not at all reflect our company's views on the Haiti relief efforts. He will no longer contribute to ESPN."

Imagine that I’m a caveman. Imagine that I’ve chosen to build my house out of balsa wood, and that I’m building it next to a roaring river because I’ve decided it will make harvesting fish that much easier. Then, imagine that my hut is destroyed by a flood.

Imagining what would happen next is easier than imagining me carrying a caveman’s club. If I were lucky enough to survive the roaring waters that took my hut, my tribesmen would say, “Building next to the river was pretty dumb, wasn’t it?.” Or, if I weren’t so lucky, they’d say, “At least we don’t have to worry about that moron anymore.”

Sure, you think, but those are cavemen. We’re more civilized now – we help each other, even when we make mistakes.

True enough. But what about when people repeat their mistakes? And what about when they do things that obviously act against their own self-interests?

In the case of mistakes and warnings as applied to Haiti, I don’t mean to indict those who ignored actual warnings against earthquakes, of which there were many before the recent one. Although it would have been prudent to pay heed to those, I suppose.

Instead, I’m referring to the circumstances in which people lived. While the earthquake was, obviously, unavoidable, the way in which many of the people of Haiti lived was not. Regrettably, some Haitians would have died regardless of the conditions in that country. But the fact that so many people lived in such abject poverty exacerbated the extent of the crisis.

After the tsunami of 2004, the citizens of the world wailed and donated and volunteered for cleanup, rarely asking the important – and, I think, obvious – question: What were all those people doing there in the first place? Just as important: If they move back to a place near the ocean that had just been destroyed by a giant wave, shouldn’t our instinct be to say, “Go ahead if you want, but you’re on your own now.”?

We did the same after Hurricane Katrina. We were quick to vilify humans who were too slow to respond to the needs of victims, forgetting that the victims had built and maintained a major city below sea level in a known target zone for hurricanes. Our response: Make the same mistake again. Rebuild a doomed city, putting aside logic as we did.

It shouldn’t be outlandish to hope that we might stop short of the reactionary word that is so often flung about after natural (and unnatural) disasters. That word: Rebuild. Thus, the tired, knee-jerk cycle of aid/assist/rebuild would be replaced by a new one: Aid/assist/let’s-stop-and-think-before-we-screw-this-up-again.

If forced to do so through logic-colored glasses, no one would look at Haiti and think, “You know what? It was a great idea to put 10 million people on half of an island. The place is routinely battered by hurricanes (in 2008, $900 million was lost/spent on recovery from them), it holds the aforementioned title of poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, and it happens to sit on a tectonic fault line.”