The developed world—particularly the wealthy nations of Canada, the USA, Mexico, and a rich island or two in the Caribbean—have opportunity staring them in the face in Haiti, should they care to look beyond today and see tomorrow.

The immediate need is to alleviate the current suffering that has captured the lenses of the world.

The community of nations, however, has a short memory and an even shorter attention span. One axiom of crisis communications is that another crisis is always looming. Bide your time and soon the eyes of the world will be diverted. The scale and magnitude of the devastation in Haiti (a scale so great that many grasp the wrong word—enormity—to describe it) is mesmerizing. The images still dominate the media and social media applications that matter. They should; we should be shocked, horrified and sickened to see people suffer such misery.

The secondary need, however, is slippery. What we have to do is prevent Haiti from slipping even further away from stability, democracy, dignity and opportunity.

Even in its best days, Port au Prince, was, by all accounts, a dismal place of violent crime, broken government and hopeless people. Numb from decades of dictatorship (a belated thanks-for-nothing to the Duvalier family and their henchmen), corruption (reportedly endemic) and environmental disaster (deforestation seems to have been a sport) have left Haitians with few expectations from the outside world. Nobody helped them when Papa Doc and his cronies crushed them; nobody cared when Baby Doc continued his father’s iron-fisted and corrupt rule. (There was a matriarch of sorts in the form of Madame Duvalier, too, who was sometimes known as Mama Doc, but not to her face. Her influence declined when her son married and booted her out of Haiti.)

We need to remain with Haiti until the nation can stand on its own two feet. This means we have to ignore kooks like Hugo Chavez who accuses the USA of occupying Haiti under the guise of giving aid. It means we have to tell religious crackpots to shut up when they lay the blame for the earthquake on a pact made with Satan. (Thereby giving all true believers a free pass on making a relief donation, or even giving a damn for that matter.) We also have to ignore our own desire to fix the problem quickly and go home.

The opportunity is that Haiti will be rebuilt. Physically—with safe buildings erected by competent contractors who follow real building codes—and governmentally with the foundations of a true democracy that works for the benefit of all the people and not just a selected few.

It takes a certain type of optimist to see a silver lining in such a tragedy. But optimism is not needed to recognize the reality of a society in complete collapse. In the absence of government there will be leadership and there will be rulers. In a place such as Haiti, however, rulers can be determined by who has more guns, ammunition and hired goons. Leadership can be exercised by whoever has the firmest fist, without any pretense of a velvet glove.

Haiti’s rich, developed neighbours (I include Canada as a neighbour) must respond with money, aid, support and patience.

The last item will be the hardest to source. It will also be the most valuable.

From time to time we can all be surprised by our own humanity. While evil has been described as “banal” (see: Hannah Arendt) there are fewer descriptions of destruction, natural disaster, or catastrophe.

Evil is active where natural destruction seems, in comparison, to be passive. It occurs but it does not require an agent to encourage it along. We can fight evil, but we can only respond to natural destruction. It is our response to it that makes us part of the human race.

Global media are consumed with the earthquake in Haiti; this is a valid and understandable response to such magnificent tragedy. The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere—already suffering from decades of neglect, abusive regimes and greedy oligarchs—brought even lower by natural disaster.

What strikes me as significant, however, is how in this time of instant video reporting, camera crews on the ground and teams of reporters arriving by special flights (media stars were dispatched in record time to report from the scene) it is the still photograph that can cause us to stop, stare, wonder and respond.

Reputable newspapers (in Canada, The Globe and Mail, National Post and Ottawa Citizen) are all filled with images from the disaster. The all-too colourful images of Port au Prince call to mind the stark black and white photographs of war torn European capitals from previous wars.

The speed and efficiency of video transmission renders the images powerful, but somehow fleeting. A still photograph invites the viewer to linger and note things that would be lost with a moving image.

The look of despair, resignation and even defeat on the faces of the victims is something terrible to behold, but only visible if you can absorb the entire image and allow it to sink in. It is our ability to be moved—and subsequently to reach out and, somehow, respond—that reminds us of our shared humanity.

Want to help? Reputable relief agencies are soliciting money to help Haiti. Three smart questions:

1. What will you do with my money?
2. When will you use my money?
3. How much of my money will go to administration expenses?

Yesterday a colleague noted that the front page image of a major Canadian newspaper was credited to Facebook, the social media site that many use to keep in touch with friends and families. Birthdays, family vacations and pictures from a golden wedding anniversary are the stuff of social media lore. Long-lost high school chums finding one another on Facebook were, for a time, a staple of soft journalism.

In an earlier era the Personals section of daily newspapers often carried short ads from people looking for lost loves, estranged family members, past neighbours and so forth. There was an element of sympathy for the person who placed an ad encouraging someone to “call home, all is forgiven” or wondering whatever happened to the boys from the Cub Pack.

We read these ads knowing we would never know what happened to long-lost Uncle Joe, or if John and Marsha patched things up.

The Viet Nam War—a miasma of grief broadcast to hundreds of millions of living rooms on the evening news decades ago—created the modern take on the storied war correspondent. Images from the battlefield, field hospital or ruins made war real, and perhaps routine, to the audience back home. Given the media consuming habits of the Viet Nam War generation (tune in at 6 for the evening news, with a trusted anchor) the war could be presented, positioned and edited for public consumption.

Someone, somewhere, was exercising final approval on what made it to the network. Brutal images (still available all over the internet) from Viet Nam played no small part in sickening public opinion and helped turn its tide.

In due course the public lost their appetite for the war and the confrontation ended, after too many years, with a whimper and not a bang. Perhaps the audience had seen too much?

The image on the newspaper yesterday was not edited. It was real, raw and as unscripted as life itself. The growing bank of images—of mind-numbing devastation coupled with the awareness that Haiti is a place of poverty, struggle, dictatorship, crime, violence and a complete lack of hope—are reaching a new audience.

The audience today has countless options for information. Social media updates about the earthquake in Haiti will continue to proliferate as NGOs, news organizations (legitimate and illegitimate), charities, support groups, interested bystanders, family members and the  public reach out online for information, images, context and, most importantly, understanding of the events in Haiti as they unfold. Moment by moment.

I believe that this change is a good one. Unhindered by an editorial bias, citizen journalists are at their best when presented with a story that begs to be shared with others. Sharing the images, stories, experiences and developments in Haiti using social media tools empowers us. It is impossible to ignore the suffering of strangers when our knowledge of that suffering comes from a stranger.

The late Walter Cronkite was often called “the most trusted man in America.” I trust the citizen journalists, social media users and others “broadcasting” from Haiti just as much.

We have watched the destruction and its aftermath. Social media tools and citizen journalists will enable us to watch the response and reconstruction. We will know what happened to the people affected by the earthquake; watch hospitals, schools, police stations and presidential palaces reopen and—thanks to strangers on the ground—remain involved.