Thursday, January 14, 2010

Why Can People Care About Natural Disasters and Not National Disasters?




















Picture: Damon Winter/The New York Times

Disaster: a sudden calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction; broadly : a sudden or great misfortune or failure (Merriam-Webster Online)

As I made coffee this morning, I was musing on the fact that Fox News was feigning emotion and concern in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake disaster. The big screen in the employee lounge was filled with images of crumbled concrete buildings interspersed with plasticized, botoxed slim women and overweight men furrowing their brow to the best of their ability with skin that stretches so tight.

Normally Fox News (Fair and Balanced???) is the epitome of banal partisan hate mongering and mud slinging from the far right in the media. Normally issues that are destructive for large groups of minorities, particularly poor and black people or LGBT people are simply dismissed. It's not system that needs fixing. It's the fault of the victims. Really? In one of the only developed countries in the world where medical bankruptcy is even POSSIBLE, it's the fault of those without the money when calamity strikes? In the UK, Germany, Japan, Taiwan and Switzerland, to name a few, there's no way to lose your financial soul when you are out of work and you become seriously ill. What about sub-prime loans and foreclosures? Crack in the projects? You get the idea...

So disaster struck Haiti, and here was Fox News, dropping everything to provide constant coverage. Make no mistake, the situation deserves coverage. 7.0 on the Richter scale is beyond serious in an urban area with no rebar in their concrete, no building codes for resistance to damage in a seismic event. For the few not aware, the Richter scale is exponential. That means that the death toll for a 7.0 is worse than a 6.0 in an extreme. Look at your ten fingers, and imagine that for each finger you lost, your rate of blood lost per minute was multiplied by ten. Welcome to logarithmic damage. Remember Hurricane Katrina? Yeah, I bet you do. The conservative news media "cared" about that one too. Did they give proper attention to the underlying issues that affected who suffered and died and who didn't? Nope. For that, I recommend you watch Spike Lee's four-hour epic documentary "When the Levees Broke".

So I've stated that people (at least the Fox News set) care, or at least feign care about natural disasters when they don't care about other serious things that devastate lives and result in death. Exploring the definition of disaster, I think it all comes down to the "sudden" aspect. I guess my idea of "National Disasters" is poorly defined because it isn't sudden, but long-term. People easily care about things that happen suddenly. They lend themselves to television. The big numbers are easy to grasp. The uncertainty of how many people are alive with broken bones under a collapsed freeway overpass is more gripping than wondering how many people will have their lives torn apart by AIDS in any given year. A major city in Haiti being leveled is more cinematic than thinking about how hard it is to live past the teenage years in certain neighborhoods in Baltimore (thank you, creators of "The Wire", for changing that a bit).

Simply put, the attention span of our hearts sucks, as a nation. We worry about what will affect our taxes next year, the amount that we can battle to save on the purchase of our homes and automobiles, and we remember the sweater we were given last week as a gift, but we can't see the growth of the forest from the weeds. We drag our heels on any issue that could result in a more livable world for our great-great-great grandchildren. We think selfishly.

Perhaps National Disaster is the wrong title. Perhaps National Disease is more appropriate.

Disease:
1 obsolete : trouble
2 : a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts that impairs normal functioning and is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms : sickness, malady
3 : a harmful development (as in a social institution)
(Merriam-Webster Online)

So, in answer the title of today's blog, I guess many of us here in America understand disaster, not disease. Or perhaps we do, but are so skilled at micro-managing the focus of the exploration of disease to suit partisan slander and pitting one group against another. We suck at focusing the fix on the biggest problems.

Simple-Disaster-Earthquake, Flood or Volcanic Event.

Hard-Disease-Health Care in America, AIDS, Climate Change.

Let's find a way to dig down and donate to our charities of choice for the disaster in Haiti today, but let's also find a way to support change from our diseases (harmful developments) in our bodies/homes/neighborhoods/cities/states/country/world. Let's expand the attention span of our hearts.

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