Last night, the children and I said a special prayer. I mean, we pray every night. But last night called for a down on your knees, prostrate yourself down on the floor type of prayer. You know the kind where you know you need to be in the most humblest of positions for what you have to say.

Our prayers were for the people in Haiti. And of profound deep gratitude for our own lot in life.  

I made the mistake of OD-ing on CNN yesterday. And it made me sick.

Anyone else feeling some kind of way?

And the pictures, videos and reports coming in from Haiti, were just  heart-wrenching. The devastation is beyond comprehension. And so is whatever is slowing down the relief efforts. 

I watched CNN medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta tend to a 15-day old baby girl with a head laceration. The baby girl’s mother had died. The baby, thankfully, didn’t have a skull fracture, according to Dr. Gupta, but needed antibiotics. There weren’t any around.

I watched a young teenage boy watch helplessly as several men tried to rescue his sister from under a large slab of concrete. Only her feet were visible. But you could hear her yelling out in pain.

I watched men collecting and carrying bodies in a white tarp, and then putting the bodies into a bulldozer scoop. Yes, a bulldozer.  When the bulldozer is full of bodies, it is raised and the bodies are dumped into the nearby dump truck.

How can humans be treated this way?

This is tragedy. But it is also a deadly mix of tragedy and poverty in a country that seems to have had more than its fair share of both.  The recent 7.0 magnitude earthquake that rocked the Haiti’s capital city, Port Au Prince is just the most recent painful development. Last year, it was back to back hurricanes that wreaked havoc on Haiti’s most fertile region. And long before that Haiti’s history has been a history of coups, flawed elections, corrupt governments, various military occupations and high crime.

Though these sad but true facts about Haiti’s mismanagement and poverty receive more media air time, we should know Haiti's true story. Haiti has world-renowned artists and musicians, and a storied history of political defiance.  Haiti is actually the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world. Did you know the country was created when former slaves defied Napoleon when he reversed the 1794 emancipation decree of the French Revolution?  The former slaves defeated an army led by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, breaking away from powerful France—the only nation’s whose independence was gained by a successful slave rebellion.  Imagine a country run by black men at a time when slavery ran rampant.

Today, the desperation is beyond belief. Needed supplies and relief are slow to reach the needy. And, once again, we can't stop asking, Why??

There’s so much we don’t really know about Haiti and why it is as it is, but one thing I’m certain of. Haitians are resilient, and strong.  They have a strong sense of pride, family and community. With such an earnest beginning, you can only imagine their strength. We know what Black people from any country are made of.

As a mother, I feel deep compassion for the women who may be searching for their children. For children searching for their parents.  As in so many cases, it is often the children who are the greatest victims.  In our “woes” as mommies in America, we take so many things for granted.

I don’t know what it feels like to have your home completely destroyed, to have no water or electricity, to have lost loved ones in minutes, and to de displaced in such an extreme manner. I don’t know what it must feel like to live in a place where you have to wait for emergency rescue to arrive from other countries.  

I pray that with God’s grace I am never in those circumstances.

But, if so, I am doing what I hope others would do for me.

Be compassionate.

Donate what you can.  (I've given to the Red Cross and Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti fund)

And pray incessantly. 

Please share what you are doing.

Like any mom, I’m always looking for a teachable moment. In school, at the dinner table or in the check out line. The other day, I was searching for one in the news (I know, crazy right??) The constant bombardment of coverage of Sen. Reid’s racial faux pas on every cable news network was so asinine I wanted to cancel my cable subscription in disgust (but the new season of Big Love just started. LOL!).

In case you’ve been in a cave, the uproar is over the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s recently published comments about President Barack Obama.  A new book quotes Reid, (D-Nevada), as saying privately in 2008 that Obama could be successful as a black candidate in part because of his "light-skinned" appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

Now Reid is under fire for making racial insensitive comments, with many Republicans calling for him to resign. WTH?

Now apart from the use of the word, Negro, which makes him sound more like an Uncle Bens-throwback than a racist, the fact is, what Reid say, is indeed, true. In fact, most African Americans agree with Reid.

Let’s review. Is Obama light skinned? Yes.

Does he speak a straight-from-the-suburbs-Harvard-educated level of English ? Yes.

So what? So do 10 million other black Americans. We’ve just been stereotyped as infinitive splitting, participle dangling fools, so any black person with a standard command of the English language is viewed as an anomaly.  And truth be told, anyone of us can pick up a “Negro dialect” when we want to have one. That’s a trick black people have been navigating for years. Some historians assert it was a survival tactic we learned during slavery. Researchers have even documented our ability to “shift” in and out of our various worlds, “shifting corporate” to use our educated “work” voice in the office or around white people, and then “shifting” again to have a more relaxed vernacular when we’re among like folks. You know how we do.

BTW, have you read, Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America by Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-Gooden, Ph.D.? Great book! Here's the Amazon link:   http://www.amazon.com/Shifting-Double-Lives-Black-America/dp/B0009309DQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263308132&sr=1-1 

Anyway, what was even more upsetting is that the majority of people in an uproar about this alleged insensitivity to Blacks are…wait for it….non-Blacks.  Oh yeah, and the black man who heads the Republican National Convention, but I’m not sure we’re still counting him these days. Are we?  

But deeply recessed behind the media hype and the blatantly obvious political agenda, I did manage to extricate a few critical lessons about life in America that I hope to pass along to my beautiful brown children.  

1.      Don’t tell the truth.  Telling the truth is not appreciated in this country. Especially when the truth involves race. We are absolutely, positively not ready to have an honest conversation about race in this country. I think the history of comments posted to some of my Momlogic blog posts speaks volumes to this little nugget. Did you see the 83 comments on my spanking in suburbia blog?? Even my mama was worried.  

2.      Don’t ever use antiquated words.  This is truly one to grow one. Keep up with the current politically correct or popular parlance.  Pick up a People magazine or watch Sports Center, for crying out loud. Nobody wants to get caught using words that only the Census Bureau and old politicians are still using.

3.      Don’t bother apologizing. Reid has apologized and apologized and apologized. His apology has been accepted by the President and countless other black leaders have continued to support him, but to no avail.  Apparently, the “I’m sorry” thing only works with athletes and cheating politicians.   

4.      Don’t say stupid stuff in books.  Books really stick around…and on shelves!!! And can make your “2000 and late” comment look like current events. Instead, go new media 2.0 and make your racial faux pas on the Internet. Then if anything goes wrong, you can always pay a reputable search engine optimization company to make sure your bad press falls off the Google search engines.

And there you have it people! Thank you Senator Reid for your wrongs. I have truly learned a lot about America.