Actual excerpts from my local newspaper

[XYlophonetreeZ]

So there's a big front-page article about the earthquake, which killed over 22,000 people in the Indian Ocean region (although they had only counted 13,390 when the article was published). Now that's an OK-sized number, but I'm American and don't personally know where any of these countries are- I've never seen them in the mainstream news or anything. So I figure it must be a slow news day. I try to read the article, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense. I've never heard of these places and cannot relate to these non-white people. But thankfully, I have a really, really good local newspaper. God bless the Raleigh News and Observer. They were thoughtful enough to include 2 very helpful images and captions to help me understand the seriousness of this natural disaster. The first one, large and centered in the frontpage, depicted 5 dark-skinned, poor-looking men carrying the dead body of a white person on a stretcher. The caption read "Thai rescuers carry the body of a tourist killed at Krabi beach on the island of Phi Phi, a resort crowded with European visitors where "The Beach," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was filmed. Two hundred bungalows were swept out to sea." (I am DEAD SERIOUS, this was a real caption.) Now, I don't really know or care what these "bungalows" are, but shit... Leo DiCaprio? Him I know. I was so sorry for those European tourists that, I'm not gonna lie, I started to get a little weepy. Then the caption below showed two female Swiss tourists crying, embracing, and comforting each other in another Thai resort island. One of them looked like she might be kinda hot, but her head was turned. She had nice boobs though. I've never been to Switzerland, but I heard they have a lot of money. I wish I was rich enough to go to Thai resort islands when I felt like it, only without all the earthquakes and dying and stuff. But again, these were people I could relate to, and I wanted to just get in the middle of that hug and comfort these Swiss tourists, and feel the hot one's breasts. At that point I was crying so much that my brother came over and slapped me across the face, calling me a sissy-boy. But then I showed him the pictures and he joined right in. Pretty soon my whole family was in on the tearjerking fest. But then I pointed out, "These people should be thankful they didn't witness 9/11," and my family nodded in agreement. I still get misty thinking about those 2,000 Americans.

[/sarcasm]. Seriously, what the fuck is with these news people? Damn, this earthquake sucks. The idea of that many deaths is mindboggling. Let's see how much money my school can collect in donations for relief from this quake. Let's see if we're still remembering the three-year anniversary of this disaster. Let's how long it takes before some other news story about the ever-changing Bush cabinet or steroids in major League baseball overtakes this. Let's see how many Americans actually care.

P.S.- I am not in any way trying to downplay 9/11. But the fact is, many, many more people died here and there will inevitably be much less of a big deal made of it. That is my point.

[The Talking Pie]

Good point. Awesome use of sarcasm also.

[Mota Boy]

Three Americans died too. That's a news story in itself.



Seriously though, it's understandable. I used to assume that we were the only country that counted out our dead in overseas disaster until I started reading foreign papers that, too, focused on their citizens. Are we going to remember the three year anniversary of this? Fuck no. But do you think that Thai citizens marked 9/11/04? Fuck no.

As disasterous as this earthquake was, it's not going to change our life in the least (As far as I know. I have some friends from Thailand and the company for which my dad works has some assets in Malaysia, but those are just tangential relations).

Likewise, 9/11 did not just signify the death of 3,000+ people, it also begat a sea change in U.S. foreign and domestic policy - the U.S. was now going to focus it's attention on the problem of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism above all. We'd been adrift sense the end of the Cold War. We'd been promoting democracy abroad, but not with nearly the gusto with which we threw ourselves into the fight against communism.

Likewise, for the first time in history, Americans truly felt vulnerable in their own country. It was the opening salvo in the latest undeclared war - an event of historical geopolitical implications.

This is a disaster. People died and that's bad, but this isn't going to lead to a political realignment in Indonesia or a dramatic Thai foreign policy shift. And even if it did, it wouldn't nearly have the global importance of a change in U.S. policy, merely because we're the most powerful nation in the planet. Go to Madrid and see how people care about the train bombing this year compared to the Bali bombing a few years ago. Then see how those two events rank on Australia's scale of importance. It's human nature to care more about those with whom you share some sort of kinship.

Focusing on Leo and Swiss tourists is about as yokelly as you can get and quite embarassing, but I doubt that rural citizens in Uruguay care much more about this than the readers of the Raleigh News and Observer.

[Vera]

One of them looked like she might be kinda hot, but her head was turned. She had nice boobs though. I've never been to Switzerland, but I heard they have a lot of money. I wish I was rich enough to go to Thai resort islands when I felt like it, only without all the earthquakes and dying and stuff. But again, these were people I could relate to, and I wanted to just get in the middle of that hug and comfort these Swiss tourists, and feel the hot one's breasts.

Wow, yeah, that's some excellent use of sarcasm PLUS exactly how I felt about the 9/11 attack.

Because, you know, boobs make all the death in this world so much better.

What the fuck are you smoking dude? Where did that come from and how the FUCK did that help to further elaborate your point?

People on this BBS confuse me with their idiocy.

[RXP]

If everyone had a couple of breasts to hand the worlds problems would be solved.

[Vera]

Half the world already has two boobies. And with a little money, the second half can get themselves a pair as well.

[plastic_letterz]

I cant imagine whats its like for all the people who are there and what its like for their families right now.My condolences go out to them. I read an article about it on CNN.com and my reaction was "damn".

[The Talking Pie]

The main articles in The Sun here were all about British tourists. Thousands killed, and we get told about the British. Who cares? You could argue they were at-risk people anyway, given that the odds of being murdered while on vacation or crashing in the plane are obviously better than this happening to them.

Tell me about the people whose entire life has been destroyed, make me feel bad for them, not the fucking British tourists who were victims of that terrible foreign catastrophe. Oh yes, it's always nice to point out that it was foreign. It's that whole "it could never happen in a place like this" mentality. Fucking media.

Even when they take it upon themselves to mourn for the entire nation they're still making that Us and Them distinction.

[Mota Boy]

I read some article about it that claimed that children were the real victims of the incident. Dumbest fucking article I've ever read. It started with the blood-curdling statistic that one in three of all victims have been children... and that it's expected to climb as high as one half!!!

My bullshit detector went off at that. All the nations hit were third world, (OK, so technically India is second world, but third world has evolved beyond its historical Cold War meanings) meaning that they had a population skewed towards the younger generation. Sure enough, later on the article went on to mention that about half of all people in the affected countries were children.

So wait a minute, kids have been impacted LESS than adults in the body count so far? The article also had the dumbest fucking sentence I've ever seen - that there was a "double tragedy" going on, childless familes coupled with orphaned children. 1) So apparently, the tsunamis wiped out adults and children unrelated to one another, which seems to be a feature entirely unique to these tsunamis. 2) Hey, problem solved!

It was just a terrible attempt to write about the disaster as an attack on the kiddies, something to really pull at the heartstrings "Ohhh, I didn't think too much about this until I saw that kids had died too." It annoyed me.

[HornyPope]

More news should be covering it. I visited a friend who had his TV turned on that evening (since i never watch tv myself - I stress that point a lot) and all they talked about in the news was how packed are the stores during xmas rush and how they are prepared for the boxing week rush. What a news flash! Shopping? During christmas? No way!


either way, if anyone wants to help - www.directrelief.org