It sounds like me being glib, using my unending cynicism to make a point, but that’s a real, it-ran-in-papers-and-on-the-web headline from the Associated Press. Which I think is amazing. So amazing I’ve had it open on my web browser for, apparently, two weeks.
It’s from May 15, just after the cyclone and the earthquake in Asia, and looks back at what’s happened to the people we all paid so much attention to, for five second, after the tsunami.
It tries a bit hard to be writerly, but there is a beautiful and thought-provoking pieces:
The tsunami rewrote the coast of Sri Lanka and killed about 40,000 people. But there was no full-scale change in the island’s society. The government did not fall. Corrupt officials did not keep their hands from the overflowing humanitarian cash box.
And while the tsunami struck at both sides of the island’s bitter ethnic divide, leading many to hope the tragedy could help end years of civil war, those hopes died quickly. Today, the war is far more violent than before the waves came.
When disasters strike, when a cyclone tears at Myanmar or an earthquake pounds China, Pakistan or Turkey, when survivors are still being pulled from rubble-filled streets and the death toll ratches up by the thousands, it can seem inevitable that much will change.
Because how can it not? How can the deaths of so many people not at least bring the solace of some sort of wholesale reform: A more responsive government, perhaps, or at least better building codes? An end to the untiring tragedy of civil war?
But to find places where that has happened, you need to look hard.
It didn’t happen in Pakistan….Or in Sri Lanka….Or in…New Orleans.
I wish I understood this how-it-can-not. I wish it made sense to me. I wish that the empathy that overtakes us in the wave of these moments, that gush of human feeling so strong it’s almost shrill, became something tangible.
Then again, maybe most of what we’re doing here–most of the important stuff we’re doing here in this world, anyway, when we’re not just trying to distract ourselves from ourselves–is trying to make the things we feel as real in the world as they are in our hearts. This is marriage. This is mourning. This is laughing. This is giving gifts. Hell, this is even making public policy: Legislating civil rights or welfare programs, authorizing peacekeepers or food aid.
But we don’t mourn the dead every moment they are gone, and there are moments we don’t love the people we love, and moments we can’t laugh, and moments we don’t understand why in God’s name our mothers give us as gifts exactly the thing we said we don’t need.
And God knows public policy is a mess, at least in my country.
So I guess it is not surprising that whole-scale tragedy does not end civil war, or corruption, or shoddy building practices. Without the hard work of making it into something, sympathy is just another flimsy feeling.
sad, but true… and i’ll be the first to admit i’m guilty – i was a complete wreck in the days following cyclone nargis, and when the earthquake in china hit – i just maxed out on the amount of sympathy i could muster, in light of preparing for an extremely depressing situation of dealing with forced evictions and ‘accidental’ deaths of human rights activists in cambodia. sigh.
and unfortunately, policymakers without political will often count on the very fact that people will eventually stop caring instead of doing what needs to be done when asked. was at a very very frustrating event last week at the UN, lots of masturbatory navel-gazing. i think the only outcome was “we’ve got a lot of good food for thought here” while discussing the complexities of coordinating UNAMID between the UN and the AU. barf.
i grew up in new orleans, weathering (as it were) betsy, camille… smaller hurricanes that dashed in and out of my city.
katrina didn’t bring her to her knees, the government of the united states did.
i was a very small cog in helping to organise relief efforts from california, shipping semi trucks full of needed goods within three days…only to be stopped at the city limits by fema officials.
we arrived, along with some other individuals and well run church groups, long, long, LONG before the government got their shit together.
i managed to get our group through.
i see what happens elsewhere in the world, i feel sorrow there, yet, at the same time… i have such anger, knowing i go to my city, in this nation, and she is still on her knees, with a president who said two years later “this nation cares about you people down here.”
hello? you people??
and i wonder why this nation can’t rise above what it is slowly becoming.