One of my favorite morning rituals is the walk to the front of the driveway with my dog Nemo to pick up the newspapers.
Not any more.
I even have to steel myself when the alarm clock goes off because I know that the good folks at NPR will be sharing the latest news from Myanmar, where some 100,000 people or more have died in a cyclone, and in China, where the death toll is rapidly climbing into the 10s of thousands. We've had volcanoes erupting in Chile and tornadoes tearing across Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Georgia and other states . . . again.
In the midst of all of this, I've found myself reflecting some about my own response to disasters here in the US and on the other side of the world.
I'm not alone.
A friend sent me a blog from the New York Times. You might find it interesting.
I'm not surprised that we gave much more to Hurricane Katrina relief than we did to tsunami relief in Southeast Asia. What surprises me is the author's argument that we often let the media dictate how we respond to the sufferings of people all over the world and that we tend to ignore the disasters that the US media chooses to ignore!
I want to confess my own complicity in this. Mea culpa! I'm certainly not above it. We tend to read what our local newspaper wants us to read and we tend to listen to what our radio stations want us to listen to. And we tend to ignore whatever it is that they want us to ignore.
While this may be the reality, it certainly doesn't absolve us from the need to keep up with more than just the stuff that is force-fed to us each day.
Yes, there is a nomination fight going on in the United States--and an election will take place in November. And these realities will force the disasters off the front page of the paper and toward the end of the hourly news reports.
But this doesn't change the reality. The danger here is that disasters will become so routine in the world that we will cease to "connect" with the suffering and the pain and the grief. The danger here is that we will let others (the media especially) tell us what we want to hear instead of what we need to hear.
And that morning radio report and the trip down the driveway for the newspaper will become once again the soothing rituals that make life so nice and calm and that lull me into thinking that all is right in the rest of the world.
Newsflash--it's not!
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2 comments:
So, where do you go to find the relevant news?
Tim
Great question, Tim! See my post on December 10, 2007 for something approximating an answer. This works for me--as does a read of The Economist each week--not so much for the economics as for the really in-depth look at what is happening in the world. The Economist is constantly doing a cover story with an in-depth look at a country or issue. After reading it, I find Time or Newsweek to be a bit light to say the least! I also find T and N to be a bit too focused on the US. I enjoy their Asia editions much better.
I also find myself taking a quick look at the New York Times each day by moving through the continents after hitting the World button.
BBC has a great site that gives historical and political overviews of the various nations of the world. This helps a whole lot when my feeble brain is having trouble holding the historical "stuff" in my brain.
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