Tragedy in Asia

Such terrifying pictures and information coming out regarding yesterday’s Indian Ocean tsunami. They remind me of the urgency of us all starting to think and act like a single world community. The BBC has been reporting– so far– some 23,000 people known to have been killed. But the numbers are certainly rising.
So many people killed; their families bereaved. So many more badly injured. So many more again left homeless or otherwise vulnerable to the rapid spread of disease. So many hundreds of thousands of families’ and communities’ lives ruptured forever.
Human beings have incredible resilience. But if we were all, truly, a single human family, wouldn’t the leaders of the rich countries all now set aside their pursuit of marginal advantage here or there and say, “Yes! This where we can all pull together to make a difference!”
Instead of which, the Bush administration has announced it will contribute just $15 million worth of aid to the relief effort. A tragically small amount. And this, just a week after it marked the approach of Christmas by saying it would anyway be cutting back on huge amounts of emergency aid previously earmarked for the world’s poorest nations…
All this, while it continues to spend more than $250 million each day on waging the war in Iraq.
It’s obscene.
Why can’t the world’s leaders call an Asia-wide ceasefire– a ceasefire of all the conflicts now going on in the Asia-Pacific region, including those in Iraq, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere? Let’s call in the UN to regulate and resolve all those conflicts; and concentrate meanwhile on delivering all the longterm development aid that the storm-hit communities will need over the next five years.
I think that’s what a true “family” would do, don’t you?

And while we’re about it, if we were all one family, why would the Western media want to continue with its childishly self-centered focus on the problems that the storm surges have brought to westerners merely vacationing in what these media routinely refer to as “holiday islands”? As though these shore-side locations are not, more importantly, the permanent homes of many thousands times more numerous gatherings of human being who just happen not to be western, not to have white skins?
At least that majority of the western tourists who have survived these storms have intact homes to go back to. But how about the indigenous people of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Aceh, and the other hard-hit places? What has happened to the homes and lives of those people is a hundred times more devastating.
But there on the BBC t.v. feed this evening were the anchor (Mike Embley) and one of the correspondents, a white guy in Sri Lanka, blithely conflating the categories of “people” and “western tourists” as though no-one who didn’t fall into that latter category really counted as “people” at all….
As in this exchange (as I remember it):

Embley: I gather that people have been told to make their way from Galle to the capital, Colombo?
Correspondent: Yes, people have been told that that’s the only way out. And in case they’ve lost their travel documents, the British Embassy is opening a special office to issue documents that will allow them to get home…

And only after that extraordinarily solipsistic exchange did the two of them start to talk about the very much larger numbers of Sri Lankans who had been even harder hit by the tsunami’s waves.
If the BBC wants to be taken seriously as a global means of communication, it will certainly have to do do a lot better than that.
Meanwhile there are, as always, important lessons to be remembered about the contribution that sound local governance can make to the ability of communities to withstand and survive horrifying natural disasters. Last September I noted a few contrasts between the way that Cuba and Haiti were able to deal with the after-effects of that season’s hurricanes in the Caribbean. (Cuba: fairly well. Haiti: abominably poorly.) This time around, we can certainly forecast that this disaster will place a huge strain on the national governments in all the affected countries. How well will they deal with this? Let’s see.
There are some things, though, that money can and do should for all the affected communities. One is to set up decent, region-wide, technical early-warning systems– like they have in the Pacific but not, sadly, until now in the Indian Ocean. Another worthwhile thing (which also requires good local administration, in addition to some resources) is to make sure there’s a sound, well-rehearsed plan for responding to any warnings that come along.
Those are all great things to do over the long and medium terms. But first: can’t we all just start thinking a little like a single human family, and get our priorities and attitudes in line with that? Imagine what a wonderful, warm, and high-achieveing “family” this could be, and what we could all become together!
I mourn that this has not happened yet. But mainly, right now, I’m mourning for all the people whose lives have been lost or torn apart by this storm. All that amazing human potential, all that concentrated human loving-kindness and wisdom: gone, agonizingly, just like that. And their loved ones mourning, picking up, and having to carry on.