As the pictures flashed across my television screen on Boxing
Day, I was awestruck. My auntie had phoned to tell me there had
been some sort of terrorist attack in East Asia. I switched on BBC
News 24 to be greeted with the bold, rolling caption ““
“Major Earthquake in Indian Ocean, 3,000 dead.” It
wasn’t a terrorist attack like my auntie had said, but the
footage of people hanging onto lampposts against the force of wild
torrents of water had the same stupefying effect as those horrible
days when I had switched on the TV to see the destruction wrought
in New York, Madrid and, more recently, the city of Fallujah in
Iraq.
This was quite a different feeling, though. As the death toll
rose in the subsequent days (it currently stands at around 150,000
people), I wasn’t able to channel my anger toward Donald
Rumsfeld or terrorists like Osama bin Laden. This was
nature’s very own “shock and awe.” And who could
I blame? God?
The natural reflex when faced with death and loss in such
inconceivable numbers is to try to place blame. Whether someone is
guilty or not, we need to feel like someone is to blame. With
terrorism this is easy, especially with a president as morally
simple as George W. Bush.
Bush and his buddy Tony Blair tell us after every terrorist
atrocity that the terrorists are “evil” and we are
“good.” This Manichean morality makes doling out blame
a pretty uncomplicated and definite process: al-Qaeda is the bad
guy. But when faced with the arbitrary geological movements of a
tectonic plate, we are left to scramble in vain for demons to
castigate. That said, most of the anger in England, where I spent
the winter break, has been directed at the conspicuous absence of a
tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean.
Even though the Indian tectonic plate meets two other plates,
earthquakes happen within the Indian Ocean and there was no way of
warning the populations along the coast about the tidal waves
headed their way. The earthquake happened, in some cases, three
whole hours before the waves actually hit the shore. With a mere
hour of warning or knowledge of action to take, people could have
fled inland and thousands of lives could have been saved.
Here in California, the Pacific Tsunami Warning System protects
us from tidal waves of biblical proportions. It uses seismometers
to record earthquakes that cause most (not all) tsunamis around the
Pacific Ocean. If any of the plates decide to move out in the
Pacific, we will know about it a long time before any oversized
waves hit Santa Monica. We can, therefore, take the necessary
precautions.
But in the sick and profoundly un-Christian world we live in,
the more money you have, the more your life is worth. What greater
example of this than the fact that Indonesia actually attempted to
create a warning system in the mid-1990s, but Thailand had to pull
out because it couldn’t afford it.
But what else, aside from the money maxim, does the tragedy in
East Asia tell about the human condition as we start the fifth year
of the 21st century?
On the bright side, it has demonstrated clearly that even though
we live in an economic system that tries its very best to drive out
all feelings of empathy and altruism from us, we remain a naturally
generous and sympathetic species. This was movingly demonstrated by
the outpouring of grief where I have been in London and the $150
million the British public has donated to the appeal fund ““
more than what our “bleeding heart” prime minister has
pledged. I’m sure the same has been true of the American
people.
But the vast sums of money raised by ordinary people across the
world also gives a more depressing glimpse at the mess humanity now
finds itself in. Why do Thai fisherman and their compatriots rely
so heavily on the generosity of ordinary people in the West to get
through the tragedy? Why aren’t our governments doing enough?
Some sort of answer can be found in the long history of man-made
human disasters. I’m talking, of course, about the war in
Iraq. The U.S. government has so far pledged $350 million to help
the victims of the tsunami, and the U.K. government has pledged $96
million. Not overly generous, but not peanuts, either. Consider
briefly the $148 billion spent by the United States on the war in
Iraq. Or the United Kingdom’s $11.5 billion. If you take into
account that the occupation of Iraq has lasted for over 650 days,
the United States has pledged to the tsunami appeal about the same
amount of money it takes to run Iraq for only one and a half
days.
Imagine the outpouring of love for the United States across East
Asia (and the rest of an incredulous world) had Bush gone, cap in
hand, to Congress to ask for $87 billion to reconstruct the
countries ripped apart by the tsunami. Alas, this same amount of
money was requested by the president (and granted) 14 months
earlier in slightly different circumstances, being put to use
killing, according to a recent report, almost the same amount of
civilians in Iraq as have died in the tsunami.
If the money spent by the United States and the United Kingdom
on setting alight the Middle East over the past three years could
be spent on the relief effort, the desperate people of East Asia
would not have to rely on the charity of bus drivers, nurses, night
security guards and the rest of the ordinary people of the West to
save them from disease and hunger.
In the disaster, 150,000 people have died, 5 million have been
made homeless, and, according to the World Health Organization,
many thousands more will die from the cocktail of diseases that
accompany the wet and damp. Even if Iraq was a good case for
humanitarian intervention, only 25 million people live there. A
purely utilitarian calculation ““ based on the money spent on
the Iraq war ““ would necessitate a multi-billion-dollar
humanitarian operation in East Asia.
If there is anything positive to come out of this awful tragedy,
it must be the long-awaited realization by the general public that
the priorities of our governments are morally repulsive.
Kennard is a third-year international student in the United
States. E-mail him at mkennard@media.ucla.edu. Send general
comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.