For Love of Mother's Milk

Watching the dead and dying, moments of brief heroics, seeing normally stoic men weep at the devastation, I've tried not to break out in tears over the fate of the Haitians. I was mostly successful until today. The story that mothers of young babies here had donated their breast milk for the hurt little ones in Haiti made smile and cry at the same time. When you think humanity pretty much sucks (ok, I live and work in Hollywood) then such things as this happen. 140 small but powerful bottles of relief arrived Thursday afternoon: breast milk donated by American mothers.The bottles are tiny, but full of life saving nutrients for babies suffering from injuries and illness or born prematurely in a disaster area. But after surviving a commercial plane flight, a charter ride, a helicopter trip and two days on dry ice, the milk ran headlong into red tape. Some stupid Navy pinhead complained about the idea of distributing donated breast milk and issued a statement calling it an "unfeasible and unsafe intervention." Mother of God, can it be more unsafe than dying of starvation..or catching some disease because the little bodies have no immunity system developed yet? Does he think junkies are running in off the street gripping their breasts and offering milk? There had to have been some oversight in the collection of these bottles, wouldn't you think? Part of the recovery operation that sits and does nothing while food, medical supplies, shelter and other aid piles up on docks is the kind of bureaucratic atrocity that is often worse than the disaster. It certainly fuels anarchy. And it makes people like Ruth Lavida Adkins Robinson furious. What can we do?