Death & Othering

This weekend's earthquake in Pakistan/India, has claimed (as of Sunday) between 20,000-30,000 lives.

Now reach down deep inside and ask yourself how do you feel when you hear about that number. Be honest.

Does it make you feel sad?

Which makes you feel sadder, that news, or the recent news of deaths in Hurricane Katrina or Rita? Which do you get an emotional twinge:

Injured people covered by shawls lay in the street, waiting for medical care. Residents carried bodies on wooden planks. The corpses of four children, aged between 4 and 6, lay under a sheet of corrugated iron. Relatives said they were trying to find sheets to wrap the bodies.

"We don't have anything to bury them with," said a cousin, Saqib Swati.

Or the much reported picture of the dead woman at the Superdome with a sheet wrapped over her?

Why is it that earthquake won't be discussed in graphic detail around watercoolers around the country tomorrow morning?

The number is huge. The destruction is devastating.

Yet you still are not feeling the same empathy.

What if the 30,000 dead would have been somewhere in California?

How would you feel then?

Once again, because we like to "other" societies who are "different" than us.  But for Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake might have gotten an even smaller news item, perhaps not even on the front page.

Why do we put up barriers so that news like this doesn't really affect us?

Ask yourself what is in our psyche that this news shouldn't touch us?

Now think of all the other times disasters, in your lifetime have happened, when you read tragedies on this massive scale, that you glance over. Now think of all the time and empathy you have ever given to any personal story on a small scale.

What stops us from identifying from people outside our nation's borders, our culture?

Is this societal or political?

Perhaps would she be asking ourselves these questions. Is it our family upbringings that make us not care? Or is this inherent in our societal structures?

Right now, because of the Internet, the global world is in our backyard, yet perhaps we need a new generation of people to start treating it like our backyard.

Perhaps, our next generation will feel for others they can identify with.

Comments

[Deanne]

Hey, Mark - I think people do care. It's just that "disaster fatigue" sets in. What the world needs to focus on is the rich v. poor gap - why so many poor people are forced to live in shabbily constructed houses that are likely to collapse during in an earthquake? And the enviro damage that precedes natural disasters - such as the hyper-development of wetlands on the Gulf Coast, which likely contributed to rapid flooding. Many scientists agree that in Indonesia, the loss of mangroves along the coast - ripped out to make hotels - was a factor in the tsunami rushing inland, unchecked.

[Lost In America Org]

"What stops us from identifying from people outside our nation's borders, our culture? Is this societal or political?"

I do not believe the question you ask is broad enough for clearly the problem does not rest solely with out inability to identify with people from other countries. Rather, this inability or perhaps lack of care also centers on classes of people within our own country as well. And it does so because all too often people tend to believe that unless a problem is one that mainstream media says is worthy of our attention or that such effects us personally in some way. We go on about our day living in never never land.

Christopher

[Mark Treitel]

Good point Christopher. Watch as America stops caring when more tragedies occur here like 3rd Category 5 hurricane. Death of birds in other countries not affecting US yet.

[Lost In America Org]

Thanks for responding Mark,

The American people are undoubtedly the most arrogant in the world. Pesupposing that we are indestructable to practically everything and ultimately refusing to curtail our arrogance in the face of repeated disasters.

I work in the mental health field and have been involved deeply in political matters for nearly a year now specific to the field I work.

I am amazed at the lack of care people have for human beings with mental retardation and developmental disabilities.

But then I am reminded of the fact that when we do not care about our own family and our neighbors why on Earth would we care about strangers beyond an immediate crisis.

Hence, I have to wonder if the American willingness to get involved when an crisis occurrs but only insofar as the immediate crisis and not much more beyond. Is this a sign of American greed for fame and glory in the face of American inabilities to have genuine care when and where it matters the most?