Compassion Does Not Recognize State Boundaries.

 

You know, sometimes I wonder if this whole war on ignorance business was such a good idea. I mean, most days, it seems like I’m preaching to the choir, like everyone’s on the same page as me. At such times, I consider just hanging up my warrior hat for good, and blogging only about really important stuff. Like Beyonce. Or Kim Kardashian.

But then I get a comment like the one below (in response to my Bangladesh flooding post) and suddenly, my life has meaning again. I know, I know, I really need to just let some things go and not take everything so seriously. Believe me, I did my best to let this one go. But this particular comment so irked me that I had to devote an entire blog post to it.

To the person who posted a comment under the name Maruti Turbo, thank you. Thank you for giving me something to blog about on this slow day.

Maruti Turbo
Why you showing interest in Bangla Desh Suddenly??
What is your hidden agenda?
Dont try and say you always have loved Bangla Desh!
Maruti Turbo,

You can see my response to Maruti Turbo here.

There is so much I can write in response that I don’t even know where to begin. So I’ll begin where I always do, with pseudo-intellectual nerd talk.

Clearly, Maruti Turbo seems unable to comprehend the notion that someone like me could post a compassionate, sensitive post asking readers to donate money to victims of the flooding in Bangladesh. After all, how could a non-Bangladeshi who has dared to openly criticize some some negative aspects of Bangladeshi society—specifically wife beating and domestic violence (which I’ve always maintained are not unique to Bangladesh)—possibly be sincere when writing about the misfortune and suffering of so many Bangladeshis he’s never even met?

The simple answer is that I care when other human beings are suffering and in need of help. They don’t have to have the same skin color, nationality, religion, or culture as me. We don’t have to speak the same language. Their humanity is all the reason I need to feel compassion. It’s the reason I care about domestic violence and violence against women.

In fact, somebody would need to be a pretty despicable person—and I mean on the level of mass murderer, genocideur, or tobacco lobbyist—for me to just turn away in the face of their suffering without trying to do something to help. I mean, if Bangladesh were full of Hitlers, Goerings, Pol Pots, interahamwe, and Phillip Morris executives, then maybe I would feel differently about the flooding. But I don’t have to be from Bangladesh to know that nobody deserves to endure what these people are going through. As human beings, they deserve better. They deserve more than my sympathy and my donations, but it’s all I can give them. Like people in Sierra Leone and elsewhere in the developing world, they deserve better housing, better sanitation, and better flood protection. They deserve better disaster preparedness, and better disaster relief from their government and the international community. But at a minimum, they deserve sympathy. That’s what they got from me in my blog post, and that’s why Maruti Turbo questioned my intentions.

The greater point is that, as human beings, we’re endowed with the largest brain-to-body ratio of any mammal, though comments like Maruti Turbo’s make me question whether this is a universal truth. Notwithstanding the possibility that it isn’t, I believe most people are capable of feeling positive emotions like love and compassion. Even the most emotionally stunted individuals are capable of feeling concern. But if we so readily feel these emotions for our family and our close friends, how can we not feel them when we see other human beings in distress? The fact that these other people are not in our immediate social or familial circles should not be an excuse? Why stop at family and friends? Why not expand the circle of compassion to neighbors and countrymen? Why even stop there? Why not include people in other countries? Our brains are certainly big enough to process the information that produces these positive emotions? Why limit ourselves?

Which brings me back to Maruti Turbo. Why would he/she have such a hard time accepting the sincerity of my post, or my motivation for writing it? Is it because of my non-Bangladeshiness? Maybe it’s because I’m from Sierra Leone? Or is it because I’m part Jewish? Who knows. Who cares. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that people—regardless of who they are or where they’re from—are capable of feeling compassion for others, even if they are geographically distant. That’s something to celebrate, not question.

As the thousands of Bangladeshi peacekeepers demonstrated during their time in Sierra Leone, compassion knows no national boundaries. Nor should it. If Maruti Turbo is Bangladeshi, I urge him/her to follow the example of his/her compatriots.

The planet’s too small for us to only care about people who share our blood, nationality, religion, or language.

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Death Toll Rises From Flooding in Bangladesh.

Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh on Thursday, generating a six-meter-high tidal wave and causing widespread flooding and massive destruction in coastal communities. The flooding has been declared a national calamity by the government, and relief agencies are reporting that over 3,000 people have lost their lives. Aid workers fear the death toll will continue to rise as they gain access to the more remote areas that have been cut off by floodwaters. Aid groups are also voicing concerns about outbreaks of waterborne and other diseases. The Bangladesh Red Crescent Society is appealing for $5.7 million to cope with the disaster.

The Red Crescent Society predicts that, based on past experience, the death toll from this flood might surpass 10,000. And, according to news reports, relief aid has been slow to arrive because, in some remote areas, there is no government or relief-organization presence on the ground. The Chicago Sun Times reports on one farmer who has not received any aid for himelf or his family because food dropped by military helicopters is immediately carried off by mobs.

I don’t even know what to say. I know this catastrophe has something to do with global climate change, shifting weather patterns, and rising sea levels, but it seems pointless to get into that right now. The most important problem right now is that people are dying.

There’s not much I can do to help victims from here, but I will send money to aid groups that are in a better position to help people in Bangladesh. In the early days of the 2004 Asian Tsumani, donations from individual American donors surpassed the amount pledged by the US government. Individual giving can make a huge difference.

Below is a list of organizations that are raising funds for flood victims. If anyone knows of local Bangladeshi aid groups that are raising money IN Bangladesh, especially in remote rural areas, please give me their names and web addresses so I can add them to this list.

If my community were ever flooded, I’d hope people wouldn’t just shake their heads and turn away. Do unto others . . ..

Drishtipat

Bangladesh Red Crescent Society

Save the Children – US

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

AmeriCares

Oxfam – UK

World Food Program

Also, I found this on the Adhunika blog:

BRAC
BRAC has committed Tk 20 crore towards relief operations. Unfortunately BRAC is not accepting donations online. As most of you know, BRAC has a remarkable track record and is very cognizant of local conditions given that they are engaged in grass-roots activities. Human rights organization, Drishtipat, is collecting online donations for Phiriye Ano Bangladesh and BRAC on their website (see below).

http://www.brac.net/


http://www.brac.net/news_files/news_2007_020.htm

Drishtipat
Drishtipat is collecting donation for the flood victims. It also has put together a list of credible organizations that are engaged in flood relief efforts

http://www.drishtipat.org/flood/

There’s also a Facebook group with an EXTENSIVE LIST of organizations that are accepting donations.

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Ignorance Loves Company: Miss Teen South Carolina Knows Little but She’s Not Alone.

During last week’s Miss Teen USA pageant, eighteen-year-old Lauren Caitlin Upton—now better-known as Miss Teen South Carolina—fumbled her way into infamy with a rambling, disjointed, and generally appalling response to a simple question, demonstrating to me that she is neither well-informed nor well-educated. But Caitlin Upton is merely a symptom of a larger problem.

That larger problem, my friends, is that Caitlin lives in a country where knowledge—especially the kind that may be acquired through schooling—is not valued. That’s why the most popular kids in school are never the top students. That’s why the smart kids get picked on. That’s why millions of people who can’t name the capital of Burundi flock to their TVs to watch beauty pageants instead of the international news. And that’s why, as a nation, Americans are woefully deficient in their knowledge of the outside world. Only 21 percent of Americans follow international news closely, while 65 percent admit they lack the background to follow overseas news. Ignorance is part of the American way of life and people like Caitlin Upton merely serve to illustrate this.

Basically, Caitlin’s ignorant because she can get away with it. How else could she have reached the age of 18 without having acquired sufficient English or logic or rhetoric or whatever other foundational skills one needs to answer a question as simple as the one she was asked? Clearly, she’s never had to! She’s pretty, she’s blonde, and that’s enough to have gotten her this far. Her inability to think or articulate opinions is irrelevant to her day-to-day life. As the Young Turks point out, Caitlin took fourth place in the pageant, despite her moronic response!!! Obviously, the message is that nobody cares that this woman is an idiot, as long as she’s pretty. Millions of Americans are getting that message loud and clear.

Caitlin is not unique. She’s not a bad apple or an anomaly or a black sheep. On the contrary, she’s a typical American teenager. Even worse, she’s an archetypal American teenager. She is the American teenager that millions of other American teenagers aspire to be like. And our values do little to help. Beauty pageants are elegant, elaborate affairs that showcase beautiful people wearing exotic costumes. Geography bees, on the other hand, are far less glamorous and receive far less publicity. How many high schoolers would rather win a geography bee than be Miss Teen USA?

Popular culture provides even more prosaic examples. Take country music legend Alan Jackson, for example, who proudly proclaims in a hit song that:

I’m just a singer of simple songs.
I’m not a real political man.
I watch CNN, but I’m not sure I can tell you
The difference in Iraq and Iran.

But country singers are by no means the only Americans who revel in knowing nothing about the outside world. The system is rotten from the top down, and even political figures go out of their way to prove how provincial they are. How many of our political figures can speak a language other than English? How many of them have lived or traveled abroad? In fact, to have done so is considered a political liability. Remember Sen. John Kerry, who challenged George Bush for the presidency in 2004? He caught flack for having lived in Europe, for being a Europhile, and for “looking French.”

Our ignorance of the outside world is not only a part of our way of life, it is an essential component of our very understanding of how we live. Ignorance allows Americans to believe that the US healthcare system is the best in the world, despite studies that rank it far behind those found in other countries. If the majority of Americans don’t even know the names of other countries or where on the map to find them, how can they be expected to know about social and economic systems in those countries? This same ignorance allows us to defend our petroleum-based economy while the rest of the industrialized world is exploring clean and renewable energy alternatives.

Most seriously, this ignorance enabled the Bush administration to successfully conflate Osama bin-Laden’s Al-Qaeda network with all Muslims and all Arabs. Only ignorant people could have been led to believe that a secular Ba’athist like Saddam Hussein would ever collaborate with a theocratic zealot like Osama bin-Laden. Yet this is precisely the argument put forward by the Bush Administration as a pretext for invading Iraq, and the majority of Americans—knowing next to nothing about the Arab and Islamic worlds—swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Today, the people of Iraq are paying the price for our ignorance and gullibility.

In Caitlin’s case, the worst consequence of her ignorance was humiliation. For millions of other people the world over, the consequences of Americans’ ignorance may be far more dire.

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Jews for Jesus Leave No Stone Unturned in Search for Converts.

These days, it seems you can’t walk two blocks in DC without a member of Jews for Jesus handing you a flyer. While I’m generally very offended by any form of religious proselytizing, I have to confess I always accept the flyer and I always read it. I don’t do this because I think Jews for Jesus are on to something: quite the opposite, I think they’re full of—how can I put this diplomatically?—excrement.

But I have to give props where props are due and Jews for Jesus get props for being timely and innovative with their material. For example, in the middle of a DC heatwave, one of their flyers was entitled “Keeping Cool,” and it was all about how Jesus (Y’shua) is “the Son who refreshes . . . like rivers of living water.” Now from my reading of the Bible, I know that Jesus has been likened to a shepherd and even a sheep, but the river analogy is new to me. Kudos to Jews for Jesus for taking such an innovative approach to the Messiah. I mean, on a hot, sticky, humid summer day in DC, nothing sounds better than diving into a cool, refreshing body of water. And if Jesus is like that cool, refreshing body of water . . . well . . . I can understand how some people may be swayed. Not me. I’d rather see Jews for Jesus distribute a tract about the urgency of global warming and how to forestall and reverse its negative consequences. But that’s obviously not where they’re coming from.

So anyway, today’s flyer was not actually handed to me; one of my colleagues brought it in and placed it on the kitchen counter. Entitled “Paris Hilton: The Prison Life,” the flyer talks about how the law made Paris do the time for her crime, despite her parents’ hypothetical wish to pay someone else to serve out their daughter’s sentence. The punchline comes when the flyer informs me that, unlike Paris, I don’t have to serve out my sentence because Jesus has already sacrificed himself so I won’t have to. In other words, the sentence—the punishment for my sins—is eternal damnation, but Jesus could spare me this fate. The catch is, of course, I have to ask him to. Or rather, ask Jews for Jesus to pass on my request.

Which is where things get a little tricky for me. You see, I’m an old-fashioned guy who believes in accepting responsibility for my actions and facing whatever consequences may befall me. For that reason, I choose to live a life that conforms to my own personal ethics, doing unto others as I would have them do unto me, and all that good stuff. At the end of the day, if hell is where my immortal soul winds up, so be it. But I’m pretty sure I know where the only eternal parts of me—i.e., the individual atoms that make up my body—will end up. What’s left of me will end up right here on earth, making up the worms that eat the dirt into which I decomposed, and the birds that eat those worms, and the cats that eat those birds, and so on and so forth.

But that’s not what Christian proselytizers (let’s not kid ourselves, Jews for Jesus is a Christian evangelical group) want us to believe. They want us to believe that, as individuals, we are incapable of doing the right thing. In fact, they want to convince us that at the end of the day, our entire earthly existence is sinful and that we are doomed to an eternity in hell. But unlike the people Jews for Jesus hopes to convert, I’m fully prepared to deal with the consequences of my life choices and I don’t need anybody (the Messiah or anyone else) to take the heat for me. That’s how I roll.

But I have to add that, although I have little sympathy for Paris Hilton’s legal predicament, I can’t help but feel a little bad for her that Jews for Jesus is now using her story in an attempt to get people to read their tracts. That makes them almost as pathetic as Paris. I’m also annoyed because until today, I had successfully banished Paris Hilton from my consciousness, having fully convinced myself that she is a figment of our society’s twisted imagination. Now, thanks to Jews for Jesus, I can no longer deny the existence of Paris Hilton. Even worse, I’ve devoted half-an-hour and part of a blog to her.

Come to think of it, if there are no annoying proselytizers giving out flyers in hell, it might actually not be such a bad place.

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Gas guzzlers are only part of the problem.

Yesterday, I was stopped on the street by a Greenpeace canvaser who told me about her organization’s attempts to increase awareness of global climate change and get voters to put pressure on their congressional representatives to take the issue more seriously. But it’s going to be an uphill battle: The auto industry is already taking steps to pre-empt Congress. My biggest fear is not that automakers won’t make greener cars. Ultimately, I’m more worried that they won’t need to make greener cars because American consumers—once they are convinced that fuel efficiency will come at the expense of safety—will not want to buy them.

On the BBC World Service today, I heard an advertisement that is being run in the U.S. by big automakers who oppose higher fuel standards (I tried to find it online but couldn’t so I have to paraphrase). In the ad, a women is talking to her friend about the friend’s car. The friend answers something to the effect of, “I know it’s bigger than the average car but we just feel so much safer in it.” To which the first woman responds, “Well, you might want to hold on to it because this new law Congress is considering will mean Americans have to buy smaller and smaller cars.” Through these ads, automakers hope to convince  consumers that smaller cars might be more fuel efficient but they’re also less safe.

Obviously, automobile manufacturers are fighting against higher fuel efficiency requirements because it’ll mean higher car prices which will mean fewer cars sold. Since the auto manufacturers are not weaklings, they’re applying so much pressure that now Senators are openly discussing ”compromises” which might so water down the law that it’ll have no real effect on carbon dioxide emissions. But if consumers can be scared away from fuel efficient cars, automakers might be able to argue that there simply isn’t enough demand for green automobiles.

Now it’s an undeniable fact that carbon dioxide emissions are bad for our planet and everything that lives on it. Emissions have wrought havoc on our climate, leading to extremes of hot and cold all over the world (yes, I saw An Inconvenient Truth and I’m convinced!), and the melting of continental glaciers and polar icecaps. And there’s no doubt that increased carbon dioxide emissions are largely the result of human activity. Sure cow farts and other culprits are also blamed for global climate change but I’m going to include those under human activities (after all, who breeds and feeds cows). But, while we might not have the power to keep the Asians from cultivating rice in paddies or the Brazilians from burning down the Amazon (to grow soybeans and raise cattle for McDonalds, by the way!), we do have the power to pressure U.S. automakers to make greener cars that burn less fossil fuel (or no fossil fuel at all) and emit less (or no) carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately, gas guzzlers are only the tip of  the proverbial iceberg, merely a symptom of a deeper disease. These mechanical behemoths are really a manifestation of our self-centered culture, what Michael Moore refers to in his new film Sicko as the “me culture.” In this “me culture,” the individual is king and the only issues of any importance are those that directly impact that individual. So automakers simply have to say, ”fuel-efficient cars will be BAD for YOU because they’ll be smaller and less safe” and Americans will continue to buy gas guzzlers.

Why?

Because our mentality is so warped, our sense of communitarianism so suppressed, that we cannot think beyond ourselves and our immediate family. In the event of an accident, the person driving the hummer might get off lightly but what about the people in the other car? This kind of thinking convinces me that progress on the environmental front will be tough. If people don’t care that their gas guzzler can wreak disproportionate damage on a smaller car and its occupants, how can they be expected to care about the effects of climate change on the other side of the planet?

The new ads appeal precisely to this kind of self-centered thinking. The auto industry no longer bothers to argue that global warming is a hippie, tree-hugger conspiracy or that cow farts contribute more to the greenhouse effect than cars. Instead, they’ve resorted to manipulating people’s fears. Automakers tell us that in order to make cars more fuel efficient, they’ll have to make them smaller. And smaller means less safe. Simple. And so, consumers’ fear of dying in a car accident helps automakers sell inefficient cars under the guise of safety, while the planet gets hotter and hotter.

But in one sense, the automakers are right about smaller being less safe. Advances in technology and transporation have already made our planet smaller. But climate change will also make the world increasingly unstable as more and more people are displaced by drought and famine and the first water wars predicted by the Pentagon start to erupt. Darfur is only a preview of what will happen when competition for basic resources becomes violent. Eventually, everyone—especially those of us fortunate enough to live in developed countries—will have to deal with the real consequences of climate change.

When that times comes, gas guzzlers will not keep us safe.

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