US press ignores Australia's pain

October 15 2002

The British press has dubbed the Bali bombings Australia's own September 11.

But in the US, Australia is hardly rating a mention. [...]

[...] The online paper refers to two Americans killed and three injured in the blast.

As for the rest: "Most of the dead are foreigners," the article stated. [...]

Sadly, I can't say that I'm surprised about this, but it really seems part for the course for America.  Far too often, we (and I include myself in this) fail to recognize that things we hear about in distant places actually affect real people.

The night of the bombings in Bali, a friend of mine from Australia had mentioned how concerned she was because Bali was such a popular place for Australians to go.  Somehow, though, the comment pretty much went over my head.  It wasn't until I read the article cited above that I even realized how many of the dead were from Australia.

Most of the news that I've read or heard in relation to the Bali bombings has done much as the newspaper cited in the article did - mentioned how many Americans were killed and injured, and referred to the rest only as "foreigners".

This is one of the things that sometimes makes me feel ashamed about being an American - how completly self-centered we can be. It's rare that world news gets covered without having to find some tangental connection to America or Americans, and the more tenuous that link is, the less time the story is given play and the less importance is place upon it. But, if America wants to be a true world leader, then we need to start caring about what happens around the world, even if there's no "American" angle to the story.

In one of the strangest murder cases in recent memory, Ira Einhorn has been found guilty of the first degree murder of Holly Maddux.

The course of this case has taken over 25 years, from Holly's disapperance, the discovery of her body in a steamer trunk in Einhorn's closet, Einhorn's flight to Ireland and, eventually, France, a trial in absentia in which Einhorn was found guilty, the French refusing to turn Einhorn over to authorities in Pennsylvania until they passed a specific law granting him a new trial, to, finally, his conviction today.