The Tsunami's Sorrows Will Need More Than Pity.

[mrvietnam2001]

Why We Need Politics

The tsunami's sorrows will need more than pity.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER

Friday, December 31, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

Wall Street Journal

A very long time ago, before what we would call modern civilization, people ravaged by the sea, as in South Asia on Christmas Day, blamed it on the gods. The god of the sea, their poets might write, had lifted the water with his hands to rage at some mortal slight, and shaken it, like a quilt across a bed.

But these are not ancient times, and the anger of unseen deities is not available as explanation or cold comfort. We know for a fact that these deaths in South Asia were caused by the violent movement of tectonic plates--dumb, unfeeling nature precisely measurable at 9.0--and by the failure of men to put in place for these coastal nations technologies that announce the onset of tsunamis.

Because the gods didn't do this, the sense of loss is total.

Religious belief, for those whose belief includes an afterlife, is a kind of comfort that even unbelievers would be loath to deny the survivors of this tsunami. Not long ago people would offer solace by saying of the dead that he or she "is in a better place." I haven't read or heard much religious sentiment expressed in public about what has happened to the peoples around the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea.

For better or worse, the way we in the West experience the public world now, on television or in print, is exclusively secular. Most of the time when media bring terrible events close, but not close enough to touch, it may seem that the sidelining of religious belief doesn't matter much. But 2004 has been a tough year to absorb, especially because when bad things happen, modern technology lets us see it--a lot of it.

In 2004, we've sat in our living rooms and watched it all: hurricanes raging serially across Florida, bodies blown up unto banality or throats cut by Iraq's nihilistic gangs. And we witnessed Darfur, a genocide whose deaths ooze day after day, now reaching about 50,000.

In a world of extreme images, what happens when we are asked to go to the wells of empathy so often? Two weeks ago, Scott Peterson; last week, the Mosul mess-hall bombing; this week, South Asia wiped out. Time was, we'd watch the scenes coming out of Asia "in horror." Now, I think, we mostly just watch.

Atop its front page this week, the New York Times (whose reporters have covered the tsunami well) printed a 7-by-10-inch color photograph of Indian children lying dead, two of them naked babies. In our age, I guess, this means that even the abject indignity of a bad death must be seen, shared, by all.

With access to large amounts of professional and amateur camcorder footage, television has become addicted to providing similar images--one after an awful other of onrushing water, helpless people screaming and drowning in their ruined lands. The daily death-toll meter ticked upward through the week--25,000, 35,000, 77,000, 114,000.

It is odd the way television, omnipresent and essential, both enlivens our response to these event and then drives us from them. Recall how here people stopped watching images of the burning, collapsing World Trade Center towers. I think if one experiences enough human tragedy by watching it on a screen, a TV or PC, tragedy starts to look like a show. Rather than real, life becomes "realistic," moving us where we don't want to go, close to the experience of a video game.

Modern television news provides little context to its data and images. Print--old-fashioned, line-by-line reading--particularly in the best newspapers, has provided the most help in comprehending this incomprehensible event.

Television's round-the-clock feeds of raw images, such as we are seeing now from Thailand, India and Sri Lanka, are known in some circles as "data passing." In daily life or as now amid catastrophic disaster, technology pushes large amounts of information at us--data--that we don't have time to process and that we don't altogether comprehend. Who has time to think much about the images hop-scotching around Sri Lanka, India or Malaysia when there's more drama on the way, and more after that? The visual of shattered villages and broken families enthralls the eyes, but the emotions, like a pinball machine banged too hard, finally "tilt" and stop.

This is not a neutral phenomenon. The world's leading expert on how emotional, data-passed news can obliterate important context is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His homicidal bombings can't kill Iraq's 25 million people, but he knows that images and tales of sudden death will suppress calmer, constructive portrayals of Baghdad's five million people restoring their lives to normalcy.

Here's some context for 2004: The number of human beings who died of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa was about two million. The number of people who died of bad water and bad sanitation was more than two million. These deaths broke families and even whole communities with a force as hard as that in Sumatra this week. What is the answer?

The simple and obvious answer sits inside this final piece of disaster data: The Red Cross estimates that for the past 10 years when a natural disaster occurred in a developing country, the number of people killed was 589; but in what the Red Cross calls a country of "high human development" it was 51. That's 11 to 1. (Also, there's no full-time throat-slitting in countries of "high human development.")

The answer is to compress this ratio. We won't do that with aid, important as that is right now. We will never do it with the United Nations. The way we move the world's most vulnerable people away from the high risks of 11 and toward the relative safety of 1 is with the meat and potatoes of politics.

I may believe that liberal market economics joined to repeatable free elections is the way to a safer, more prosperous life for the Sri Lankas and Iraqs of the world. But belief alone never turned rocks into silver, even when all the world believed Poseidon caused earthquakes. Political work is the means the civilized world has for replacing men and ideas that are dumb or dangerous with something better. In the aftermath of 2004's too-numerous unnatural deaths, the only resolution possible is to re-enter the arena of politics and fight the good, slow fight. It's all we've got, and it is enough.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

[sting01]

Why We Need Politics

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Politic ?????? lemme think pls

Here's some context for 2004: The number of human beings who died of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa was about two million. The number of people who died of bad water and bad sanitation was more than two million.

Yes man sure, and about HIV/AIDS in Western Africa, I can tell you why those people die .... without any doubt because some big pharmacetical (the firm who sell druggs, sorry I dunno how to spell it) businesses, mostly located in USA refuse to allow the use of generic druggs, that are cheaper. Also, in those countries (western africa as Ivory coast for exemple) better to NOT go in a pharmacy, you could get FAKE druggs (mostly old one not sold in western countries and returning to the "producer" for destruction) wonder why old US medecine can arrive in Ivory Coast for exemple???????????

Don't get me wrong, I am not telling USA are guilty, the european firms do the same ... But due the huge power of your country , even in place where usually it should not happend, it happend alas .... I saw it in Ivory Coast , I saw it before that in Congo.

Whatever, I think Khommeny (I loved to work in hishouse in Nofle le chateau) have staed USA is the big devil (or something) lol (just kidding, I know you are proud to be US)

Roxannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnne