The Hurricane and Sympathy

Hurricane Katrina looks set to claimed the lives of thousands of people as well as leaving up to a million homeless. Another typhoon hit Taiwan and eastern China (around Fujian, I think), killing 10 (as far as we know now) and causing up to 600,000 people in Taiwan and 500,000 in Fujian and Zhejiang to flee their homes.

But is it just me or is there a strange lack of sympathy for today's sufferers? Where are the heroes to rush to the aid of the thousands in need? Where are the pledges of food and monetary support to countries devastated? Where are the aqua-green wristbands that cost S$2 and which teenagers over Singapore will snap up in their enthusiasm to assist the typhoon-sufferers? Amazon.com managed to get a donation link on their front page up and running within a day of the tsunami - but only recently decided, no doubt after many requests from customers to do the same for Katrina.

Are these people less deserving of help than those hit by the tsunami?

I'm tempted to think that the tsunami's major impact wasn't so much the numbers as the enormous amount of publicity it received. Perhaps it came in a period of dry media fodder, or perhaps (for me) it was closer to home, but the difference is palpable when you remember the 24-hour non-stop news reports of tsunami casualties.

Is it because of a numbers game? The Indian Ocean earthquake raked up over 100,000, whereas the recent Katrina and Talim will be lucky to get 10,000 frags. In accordance with a sympathetic theory of numbers I suppose we can then expect only a tenth of the effort raised to help the sufferers.

Or is it because the people hit are a superpower themselves? Do we think that there is nothing we can possibly do with our puny exchange rates and International Monetary Fund loans to help the drowning in New Orleans? Or, perhaps, has America Inc become nothing more than a daytime soap opera, with wars and people dying and magnificent plane-crash scenes? Are we bored of watching the Americans all the time?

(*Note* I hail from Singapore, which tolerates little nonsense and waste of resources. At worst, our most sexually deviant politician practices a "see, no touch" (as opposed to "swallow me NOW!) policy. Thus, life in other countries, especially their political mechanisms, always seem like soap opera material, with people dying, rioting, running around with weapons and screaming their beliefs. This is, I believe one of the effects of always hearing about peoples' problems but never experiencing them. We're "numbed by disaster"?)

Is it due to America's unpopular foreign policies? Is the new US delegate to the UN such a sore-eye? Bush's face so unliked?

Was it cheaper to help out in Aceh? I mean, a plane ticket to a third world country in South East Asia is a lot cheaper (for Singaporeans) than to an American state.

I can't help but wonder.

Was the Asian Tsunami a one-off? Where is that line in a disaster, even in another country, that gets our hearts tugging?

(Not to say Singapore won't do anything, of course - I'm just surprised that Singapore hasn't done anything YET)