Many people react much stronger when tragedy hits their own backyard.
Marc
Okay, Wake up call, take a deep breath.
The function of the government of the United States is to serve the people of the United States. Doesn’t it make sense that the government would provide more money for relief when something happens to its own citizens inside its own borders? But wait. “Token relief of a few million dollars,” you said? You haven’t been doing your reading, have you?
Not only is the cash amount higher than “a few million dollars,” but the U.S. is spending a few dollars by sending thousands of government employees (including an entire freaking aircraft carrier) to go over there and help. Did you count the operating costs of those aircraft? The salaries of those people?
And “no one gives a shit”? Please. Give yourself a wake-up call. Immense amounts of money are flowing into relief efforts. But when I want to give money to help victims of a tragedy like this, I don’t send it to the U.S. government, and I don’t think too many other people do, either! If you’re going to make a ridiculous, unverifiable, pittable statement like that, why not look at the total amount of relief flowing out of this country, through private donations and hundreds of individual charitable organizations?
The OP didn’t belong in “Great Debates.” It belonged in “Unfounded, Poorly Researched Inflamatory Statements.”
I’ll give you my best and fairest answer:
It’s a bullshit question reflecting a narrowminded and false viewpoint. These two things are apples and oranges. If your neighbor tries to shoot you, that requires one response. If your neighbor’s house catches fire that requires another.
The other way your questing is narrow-minded and false is that it focuses on money. The amount of money spent is not the issue in either case.
I cannot tell you how angry this makes me, to read such an ignorant statement. What does it tell me about you that your response to this disaster is to politicize it?
120,000 and counting real, living people, died suddenly and unexpectedly. Because of the disaster millions more are at risk or suffering.
The outcry and the compassion from the world has been staggering. Seldom have I been more proud to be a member of the human race. Forget the infighting and the politics. Within hours the world responded and was sending planes to asess the damage, and loading supplies. Most every country in the world is digging, and digging deep to send monetary aid.
It’s not a “few million dollars.” It’s hundreds of millions within days.
But, forget the governments. Who cares about them? They are, after all, being charitable with money that really isn’t theirs. The generosity and compassion of governments is neither generosity or compassion.
All across the world, the Red Cross, Catholic Charities, UNICEF, anybody with a connection over there has been overrun with an influx of charitable donations. The phone lines are jammed. In many cases they are raising more for this disaster than they have all year for everything else they’ve done combined.
The reason is because people are calling in and making donations because they feel genuine compassion and sympathy for strange foreign people they have never met in countries they may never have heard of.
When the phone lines are jammed, people hold for hours, and when they finally speak to someone, they offer to come in and help man the phones after they make their donation.
My local church called me yesterday. They got together with several other denominations and nondenominational charities and are sending money, supplies and volunteers. Several local doctors have left, and are shortly leaving to provide help. The group my Church told me about is sending a crew of volunteers, plumbers, engineers, an aging yet committed filtration expert, and simple workers to go over there and help. We’re buying compact tractors and bulldozers, a local dealership is donating one, and the owner is going over to assemble and run them.
And this is nothing special from my community. It’s happening all over the country, all over the world.
The level of aid, of commitment is unprecedented in history. Such an outpowering is perhaps our greatest achievement as a species. We are at our very best right now as human beings.
And you sit there and bitch.
Wait a minute. How much money has the Indonesian government given? They must not “give a shit” about their own citizens because they didn’t spend at the same rate that the U.S. spent remediating a devestating blow to its own citizens.
And how much did Indonesia give to the U.S. after 9/11?
It’s obviously apples and oranges on every level. Indonesia has far less money than the U.S. It also has far fewer skyscrapers to rebuild and fewer high-wage earners (and survivors thereof) for whom to provide. And one was a domestic response to a domestic tragedy, the other involves an internationalist response to a foreign tragedy. Ad infinitum.
Like the UN jackanapes who was criticizing the U.S. as early as one day after the event (when, by the way, the known death toll was, IIRC, “only” 20k or thereabouts, bad as that is), any judgment of U.S. aid and its sufficiency is ludicrously premature. The U.S. will end up giving many many millions of dollars, perhaps billions, to non-U.S.-citizens which (while laudable) is not one of the enumerated powers of the federal government. So what’s the problem?
If nothing else, the U.S. has an interest in avoiding societal failures in Indonesia and nearby regions where Islamism is a threat.
Every news report I have seen says that US aid for this tragedy will exceed a billion dollars. Someone here has already provided a cite for this. While I am no fan of the Bush administration, I don’t think they are dragging their heels, nor are they being ‘stingy’ at all. They seem to be stepping up to the plate and so does the rest of the world.
I don’t see the OP’s point.
There are some things worth looking at, although I wish there was a way to do it that wasn’t so inflammitory.
America’s wallets opened wide for 9/11. People gave in unprecedented amounts. Apparently the total private aid given was 1.88-2.7 billion. I’m betting that much of this was given by middle class people, not big-time doners.
While it’s heartening to see America suddenly so interested in charity, it’s telling what causes they choose. Most of the victims of September 11th were solidly middle class. Sure, there was a janitor here and there, but mostly we are talking about big-firm office workers and police/firefighters. I’m certain a good percentage of the families got life insurance policies and even without any charity would not be kicked to the streets. I am not trying to question the impact that September 11th had on our nation. It was undoubtalby a horrible and world-changing event. But as for the families, breadwinners of families with far fewer resources than most of the Sept. 11th families die all the time. People with families are brutally and senselessly murdered all the time. The scale was extraordinary but the financial impact on individual families is not that unusual event and there are families put in far more dire straights all the time. Nobody would have died after Sept. 11th if it wern’t for the sake of charity donations beyond the immidiate crisis teams and search-and-rescue efforts.
Once again, any giving is good giving. But it does bring questions to my mind when I see how free we are to give to people who most resemble us, and who don’t neccesarily need the money the most. Right now Asia is seeing a disaster of unimaginable proportions, and yet we are up in arms about buying phone cards for US troops that even with their pitiful salary make more in two months than most people affected by the tsunami make in a year. And the problem is that they have to pay for their own phone calls, not that they lack their basic needs and may die.
I also mirror the thoughts of Raygun99
I’m sure the level to which people “give a shit” is directly related to the knowledge of the event. I have randomly asked people I meet what they thought of the disaster and most of the responses have been shock that a few thousand were killed by a tidal wave (sigh). As knowledge of the event increases so will the donations.
I expect to see global economic consequences to this because many people will charge their donations over the internet. This will lead to increased personal debt and a downturn in the World economy. I’m not downplaying the need to go into debt for a good cause, just pointing out it will be noticed down the road. There may also be a shift away from hometown donations as people react to the needs overseas.
Wake up call, you need to have a cup of Sanka and simmah down.
It’s been what? Four days? What exactly do you expect to happen in 96 hours? Everyone throws money at the affected nations and boom, the magic wand is waved and everything’s ok?
They’re still sorting through the bodies. At the moment rescue workers are doing well just to GET THERE.
As far as Americans giving, there’s no numbers re: how much they’re donating privately. I haven’t donated a dime yet. Why? I’m broke, and will be until school starts again. (Have you donated anything yet, by the way?) This thing happened the day after Christmas, the all-time WORST day to ask anyone to shell out money. A lot of people are tapped out by the end of the month anyway, Christmas just aggravates it. I imagine the amounts given in private donations will only go up higher once 2005 gets going.
Give it some time before you start preaching about how nobody’s thinking of the children. Charities are doing the best they can and so are governments.
Not just the US government, either. I was impressed … ok, shocked, too … with Saudi Arabi’s generosity, and that’s not to mention the umpteen other nations whose first reaction was to do whatever they could to help. There’s no point in throwing billions of dollars at a nation when their main concerns at the moment are burying the victims and keeping the survivors alive.
On preview: yeah, what Scylla said.
I do wonder why it was necessary to make all the 9/11 survivors into multi-millionaires. Giving them help is fine but making them filthy rich is just senseless, especially since we aren’t giving jack shit to the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and SAfghanistan. Why is a 9/11 widow so much more important than an Iraq War widow?
I’m with you on this one DtC. It’s just peachy to help people but it seemed odd to be that we’d give all those folks so much spending money.
Marc
Because there is no such thing as empathy; its a religous concept, like god(s), that doesnt really exist. When people help others, its out of self interest, as in ‘that could be me’. The less someone can put themselves in someone elses place, the less likely they are to help them. This is natural, and thus there is nothing wrong with it.
For instance, I cant really put myself in the place of someone who chooses an education in a field that people do not value enough to supply a graduate of that education with a decent living, who then has to get a dead end job just to make ends meet. I would not help such a person, because their predicament is a result of their own choices. I have no sympathy.
Much as the difference between victims of 9/11 and soldiers killed in Iraq is that no one volunteered to be a victim of a terrorist attack in the WTC, while all the soldiers in Iraq volunteered to be where they are, and knew what could happen when they did.
I have no problem with giving to the victims of the tsunami, I allready have. And yet there is a heroin addict that lives two doors down who I wont give the time of day to. I can put myself in the place of one, but not the other.
This Bush hater must agree with spooje.
The only people in government who have a right to command the sort of dollars that will eventually need to be sent is Congress. They are not in session, their new members getting ready to be sworn in next week, I believe. I have no doubt that their first act will be to appropriate vast sums for relief. If they do not, THEN is the time for rebuke, not now.
However, the disaster is upon us, and the right thing to do is show that the US is not deaf and blind to the needs of those affected. If Bush has commited “only” a few tens of millions of dollars at this time, I take it as a rare, refreshing display of executive restraint on his part.
I won’t be quite this hardcore.
But didn’t Hume , to paraphrase him, make it clear that sympathy/empathy, to the extent they exist, are commodities, and limited commodities at that, which almost always diminish with distance from the actor? What surprises me, though it’s nice to see, is just how involved Westerners are getting with what is literally the other side of the world for them. I suspect that Western societies are the least-worst in combatting the “limited sympathy” parochialism that Hume suggested is inborn. YMMV.
US just announced a new figure for aid.
$350 million.
There is no way to compare the two situations. Deliberate murder vs act of nature. Why is this in GD?
9/11 unfolded on television, perhaps the most incredible images we will ever see in our lives. I think that this explains the immediate and unparalleled outpouring of money. Think of it as the most effective telethon in history. As the magnitude of this tsunami disaster becomes more apparent, more money will be forthcoming. I suspect better coverage of the initial disaster would have helped immediate donations, if you don’t mind a cynic’s view.
Scylla. You and I had our confrontation back in 2001 on this board. You lost and left the forum for a while (about the same time **december ** was banned). Then you came back and just participated in BBQ forum only. I see that you are now back again in GD forum and your nature of personal insults have not changed during the past 3 years.
Back to the OP:
One way of “giving a shit” is to care enough, before such disasters hit, by providing the 3rd world countries with means of mitigating natural disasters death and destruction.
While we set up a Tsunami Warning System to help protect the western coasts of the US and Hawaii, one wonders why we haven’t done so elsewhere?
After all, we have dozens (if not hundreds) of US military bases everywhere in the world. In addition, the US budget for Foreign Military Sales exceeds $10 billion per year.
I am not trying to mix apples and oranges. But, in terms of the essence of OP’s message, don’t we have our priorities mixed up when it comes to “helping” the countries affected with preventive measures?
Hmm. Maybe because “elsewhere” isn’t part of the U.S.?
I mean, while we’re at it, why doesn’t Massachusetts provide unemployment insurance for Queensland residents?
Spending U.S. money on non-U.S. persons is the exception, not the rule, under a federal system of limited powers. Having said that, the U.S. spends a whole hell of a lot of money, directly and indirectly, on other countries and their residents. The U.S. is the military protector, and humanitarian guarantor, of last resort for many a second-rate country from Canada right on down to Somalia.
Really, if you want to be aggressive about it, it’s easy to flip the OP on its head and ask, as I did, why Indonesia’s been lagging behind instead of stepping up its game and providing aid to the U.S. But that kind of finger pointing isn’t helpful. Bottom line: Americans have built a far better economy for themselves than almost any other country, and do a fair to middling job of sharing the wealth with those who haven’t shown as much gumption, both domestically and abroad.
Ahhh. Time travel, eh?
Why would we do that? It’s pretty clear we’d only be protecting those people from natural disasters so they could keep the oil pumping. We don’t have a right to meddle with their affairs.