The tsunami and ethics
I first heard about the catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean while I was on vacation in Brittany, blissfully trying to ignore all news of the outside world. I was checking my email one evening, however, and read with amazement an email about an old family friend who’d been vacationing in the region. She’d been playing with her family on the beach when a stranger came and told her to run inland. During the sprint away from the beach, she became separated from her husband but had to keep running anyway, to make sure her children got far enough away from the water. In the end, thankfully, the whole family was all right- the husband had survived by clinging to a pier.
This first image, so bittersweet given the utter destruction in the region, made all the other images that followed more emotionally intense for me than they might have been otherwise. The initial story, about another American who I’d grown up seeing, allowed me to really visualize being in that place and time, and comprehend a little the dimensions of the human tragedy that occurred. I think one can see some of the same trend in the media coverage, which focused on Western tourists to an extent disproportionate to their numbers, as journalists tried to make a human connection between suffer and viewer. While some might view this cynically, as the Western countries only caring about their own, I am just grateful that for the most part journalists have succeeded in getting people emotionally involved in the story, as evidenced by the massive outpouring of aid to the region.
While I am heartened by this massive show of support among the peoples of the world, I must admit to feeling a little concerned about the response of Americans. Some 150,000 people lost their lives to the tsunami, a horrible natural disaster. Such an event requires a massive American aid effort. But at the same time, the occupation of Iraq by US troops continues, which, according to a recent medical study in the Lancet, has caused about 100,000 civilian causalities. Leaving aside for the moment the divisive question of whether the invasion of Iraq was a wise idea, we Americans are still forced to accept the conclusion that the actions of our government are the proximal cause of most of these deaths, either directly or indirectly. Ethics would then seem to require American citizens to donate substantial sums of money to aid agencies working in Iraq, since we bear some amount of culpability in those deaths. The fact that this isn’t happening- that tsunami aid from Americans is so dramatic, while American aid for the civilians in Iraq is rather stingy- isn’t so much a sign of a personal shortcoming of Americans, as it is a sign of a failure of our media. Most Americans, me included, have not felt a personal connection to an Iraqi civilian, much less shed a tear over an image of a dying child. It’s not that those images don’t exist- there are plenty in the Arabic press- but that they don’t fit the narrative of us as liberators, and were thus deliberately ignored by the US media. Perhaps it’s time for us all to start seeing some of those images of suffering, too?
