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It was bound to
happen. As hard as it is to believe, it is possible for other regions of
the world to experience the wrath of Mother Nature. This time it came in
the form of a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Pakistan. And this time, I'm
fairly certain George W. Bush had nothing to do with it.
Early estimates predict that
there may be as many as thirty thousand dead in Pakistan. Someone refresh
my memory - what's the tally so far on Hurricane Katrina? A thousand?
Maybe a few more? 'What's your point, Mike?', you ask (or more likely
scream). 'Are you saying that a the true scope of a natural disaster
should be determined solely on the number of bodies lying in the street?'
Not at all. I'm merely stating fact in the hope of putting things in
perspective.
We, as a society, have grown
accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Even the poor in America have it better
than the poor anywhere else in the world. Why is that? Because America is
the land of opportunity, even for the less fortunate among us. Because in
America there is always hope. Because, no matter what you believe, we are
not lorded over by an evil dictator, bent on the destruction of the world.
We are free to congregate, to speak, to protect ourselves and our loved
ones, and to disagree with one another and the leaders of our nation. And
it is because of this freedom that we have become complacent. We are
pampered.
There was a time in this
country when even the smallest town could scarcely go a day without a
death. Thanks to new medicines and vaccines and the inexorable forward
march of technology, those days are long gone. For most Americans, simple
illnesses no longer carry with them the threat of
death.
Such is not the case in some
parts of the world. Vast segments of the Earth's population are unable to
find safe drinking water or enough food to sustain them for another day.
Our fellow humans die by the thousands every day in third world countries
and it barely earns a passing mention on the nightly news channels. Eighty
people die in a car bomb in India or Afghanistan or Uganda and it garners
only a quick two-paragraph column on page twelve of section F of the local
newspaper. Why?
'It's because we're busy
people,' you say. 'We don't have the time or the energy to worry about
people in other parts of the world. We've got to worry about America.
We've got to look out for number one.' But that's not true either. When
terrorists attacked the subways in Great Britain it was in the national
news here in America for weeks. Why is it that we refer to our friends in
Great Britain, but we never refer to our friends in
Pakistan?
You see, it's not that we
don't have the time to worry about people outside of our own national
community, we just choose who we wish to worry about. And that's okay. I
don't really want to be friends with Pakistan any more than the next guy,
but let's at least be honest about it. Why make Wolf Blitzer pretend to
care about the people of Pakistan, when we all know that as soon as
anything even remotely newsworthy happens here in America (say, Nick and
Jessica actually do break up) we won't see one more mud-caked Pakistani face on
any of the major networks.
Unfortunately all of this is
a bit off of my original thought, which is this: We can't bear the thought
of a fellow American dying (unless it's someone we know and disagree
with). But the sad reality is that far more Americans die each year in
automobile accidents than died as a result of Hurricane Katrina. And the
death toll in Pakistan may be as much as forty times the number of
Katrina-related fatalities.
The response to the
earthquake in Pakistan has been no better than that of our response to the
Gulf Coast, yet you hear nothing of investigations into 'who dropped the
ball' in Pakistan. Why? Because the people of Pakistan don't know any
better. Their only interest is to save the living, bury the dead, and
salvage what's left. They have no interest in pointing fingers. After all,
you can't very well complain about the fact that you have no clean
drinking water, no cell phone service, and no broadband connection, when
you didn't have any of those things to begin with. America is a better
place to live in on a bad day than Pakistan is on its best day. Hell,
parts of New Orleans are slowly becoming inhabitable
again.
So, maybe before we wallow in
our own self-pity and bitch about the lackadaisical response of the
federal government to a crisis, we should take a look around and thank God
above that we live in the U.S.A. -Mike Smith |