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06/01/2005: "Asia's devastation"
I am struggling to understand. Why is this devastation suddenly more important than any other? Why is there so much pressure in the public opinion to buy donations online with your credit card, to read the tragic stories of destroyed families in the Metro free newspaper, to stand in silence with crossed hands for 3 minutes before going to lunch? Morally, everybody is feeling righteous about the need to help, to stand in silence without looking at one's watch, and how my country is giving more than your country and how bad America was about not giving enough and how now America is trying to use this crisis to rebuild its reputation in the Muslim world ("This aid is a gift to from the American people").
Instant worldwide coverage with videophones and handheld cameras allows journalists to report how bad rotting corpses smell (tonight on CNN), how terrible the sound of mothers grieving their dead children is, how generous those local people are, having lost everything, and who are helping foreigners locate their relatives. All these journalists competing for the most tear-wrenching story and the most emotionally charged picture, have galvanising public opinion today with a fake story of a white child's abduction at a hospital.
What about the daily slaughters in Darfur? What about poverty, death and war elsewhere in the world, every single day of the year? Why today, why only this crisis? If Sudan had been affected, would we have given aid only to the quake victims and not to the victims of war? What if that child had died from a bullet, would his picture still have been plastered all over the Western press?
I have given money - and have encouraged other to do so as well. I, too, have stood in silence. I have watched the news trying to grasp the magnitude of this tragedy. But my feelings have been stolen, I was told what to feel.
