Hurricane Wilma hits Yucatan at 1:15 ET Friday October 21
Relief workers in Guatemala rescue victims of mudslides caused by Hurricane Stan
In
this, the year when Time's Person of the Year absolutely must be Mother
Nature, we have seen astonishing outpourings of support to the victims
of the Pacific Tsunami and (except for the US government) to the
victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Belatedly, again due to
national government incompetence, we can expect significant aid to get
through in the end to the victims of the Kashmir earthquake. We can
expect the same for Hurricane Wilma.
But in the meantime, this
year has produced a lot of natural and man-made disasters for which the
victims have been largely left to their own resources. Whole villages
in Guatemala were buried in mud and have simply been abandoned because
of Hurricane Stan. Even if rescue efforts could be fruitful at this
late date, the ground is so impassible that relief workers are prohibited
from entering some areas. The official death toll is around 800,
probably significantly higher than the toll from Katrina, but there has
been almost no coverage of this horrific disaster, and it is likely
that actual human losses, including those in the buried villages,
actually number in the thousands. The bulk of foreign aid for this
disaster has come (!) from Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands.
Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the genocide in Darfur continues unabated,
with lots of hand-wringing from countries whose media have covered the
event, but precious little action. The Janjaweed warlord militias in
Darfur have been so emboldened by the impotence of the world to stop
their atrocities that they are now attacking the troops of the corrupt
and racist Sudanese government that put them in power in the first
place (sound familiar)?
The situation in Niger (the second
poorest country in the world, where Saddam was purportedly trying to
get uranium) is even worse, and the famine that has ruined that country
has received almost no relief (Sweden again tops the list). Today 2.5
million people are on the brink of starvation. The drought and locust
infestation, the worst in 15 years, has wiped out the crops on the
already exhausted soils of this quickly desertifying nation (only 15%
of the country remains arable, and that percentage is dropping each
year). Malaria is endemic.
In East Africa, sub-Saharan West
Africa, and several Central American and Caribbean countries, the
situation is not much better. Many countries are being ravaged by
HIV/AIDS, suffer thousands of deaths needlessly from preventable
diseases for which they cannot afford the medicines, or are being torn
apart by civil wars and insurrections, some of them decades old.
Why
is it that we (a) cover some disasters in the media and not others, and
(b) send aid to help with some disasters and not others?
I would suggest that there are a number of factors that lead to this decision. Most of them are unfair:
- Novelty:
The media cover new diseases (SARS) and completely ignore old ones that
cause far more deaths (regular influenza). We generally only fear, and
care to remedy, the diseases we hear about in the media.
- Proximity:
Generally the closer a disaster to us, the more we care about it. But
in the global village, proximity is psychological more than physical.
The London bombings were psychologically closer to us than the
Guatemala mudslides. We can get to London in 6 hours, but most of us
don't even know where Guatemala is.
- Visibility: A disease or
disaster that kills spectacularly, visually, invokes more concern that
kills more stealthily, invisibly, one person at a time, even if the
total toll of the stealthy killer is greater.
- Cultural
Connection: We can relate to and therefore care more about people when
our neighbours were once their neighbours. That explains in part why
events in the Mideast are of concern to North Americans, and, more
recently, why North Americans as a whole care about the earthquake
deaths in Kashmir, but not about the deaths in Darfur or Niger.
- Deemed
Preventability: There is an overwhelming Western presumption and
prejudice that famines and wars are preventable if the people would
only modernize (i.e. Westernize) their economic and political systems.
In other words, these disasters are "their own fault". There is also a
vicious cycle prejudice that says there is no point sending relief to
people in countries with high birth rates, because "by keeping them
alive we're just encouraging and enabling them to have more babies,
which will in turn cause more famine and war". So "why bother"?
- Economic
Interest: If the victims of a disaster (natural or man-made) are major
trading partners or have scarce resources, we're obviously willing to
invest more to protect that interest.
Score each of the
disasters mentioned above by these six criteria and you have a pretty
accurate predictive model. Except for the novelty criterion, we can't
really blame the media. They generally respond to rather than drive
public opinion in these matters. South Asian immigrants make up a
substantial percentage of new Canadians, and were that not the case,
the Canadian media would not have given nearly as much coverage to the
Kashmir earthquake as they did. That coverage in turn embarrassed the
Canadian government, and the Canadian banks and major charities, into
providing and campaigning for a lot more disaster relief for the
earthquake than would have happened if the identical earthquake had
happened, say, in Central Asia or Africa or even mainland China. And a
lot more than would have been the case a generation ago before that
South Asian immigration grew into a torrent.
This is why I don't
believe that governments should shrug off to individual taxpayers their
responsibility to do their fair share to invest to prevent and relieve
such disasters. Governments (aside from the bias of economic interest)
are in a better position to objectively assess the relative need for
aid and investment of the over 100 countries that suffered some kind of
natural or man-made disaster in the last year, than we, with our
individual prejudices, are. Many "not my bother's keeper"-spouting
individuals, in fact, don't believe we have any responsibility to help
the victims of disasters elsewhere, even elsewhere in their own
country. That's why so many Americans were actually embarrassed at the
amount of relief promised and given to the victims of Katrina by
governments of other nations -- if the shoe were on the other foot (if
you'll pardon the mangled metaphor) they wouldn't lift a finger.
I
think governments that rely on their citizens to act to help those
unfortunate through no fault of their own, and waffle and hedge and
procrastinate (or put political conditions on their aid!) are a
disgrace to humanity. The fact that some in such callous, skinflint
governments claim to be deeply religious is more galling.
Maybe I should consider moving to Sweden.
[Just
as an interesting aside, the CBC's research on the Hurricane Stan death
toll indicated that the areas that had a local, community-based
emergency plan fared much, much better than those that foolishly left
it up to "higher authorities". El Salvador in particular has
inexpensive local warning and evacuation processes, which is probably
why its death toll from Stan was so low. One more indication that, in
government, business and just about everything else, small is
beautiful, and big is clumsy and arrogant.] |
7:02:07 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
