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A natural disaster that also deserves attention

4 min read
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There’s been a steady drumbeat of stories for years about how Americans know little or nothing about the world beyond our borders.

Sure, many Americans might be able to identify Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but it helps that he leads one of our next-door neighbors, and has been on the cover of Rolling Stone and a guest on “Live With Kelly and Ryan.” But if you ask most people who the president of Mexico is (Enrique Pena Nieto) or where Yemen is on a map, chances are they’ll draw a blank.

Hey, we’re a big, bustling country – heck, we’re a superpower – with all kinds of diversions and drama to enthrall us. Fair enough.

But even as the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey continues to absorb us, another large-scale catastrophe elsewhere has received comparatively little attention – floods in South Asia have laid waste to lives and property in recent days, killing more than 1,000 people and displacing millions from their homes.

The rainfall has been so heavy that a four-story residential building in Mumbai collapsed last week thanks to its foundation having been weakened by torrential rains. That calamity claimed more than 20 lives. Just as our television screens and newsfeeds have been filled with images of Houston residents wading through waist-deep water, the denizens of India’s second-largest city and the 13th largest in the world, have had to go about their daily routines while trudging through waterlogged streets. Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh have also been battered by the monsoon downpours.

The devastation in that part of the world has almost certainly been exacerbated by a lack of infrastructure or an infrastructure that is not nearly as developed as what you would find in North America, Europe or other parts of the world. Unfortunately, we’ve all likely become inured to news of cataclysms in that corner of the globe. Bangladesh alone has endured famines, floods, fires, cyclones, earthquakes, mudslides, military coups and mind-boggling levels of political corruption. It’s not for nothing that when he was Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger dubbed it a “basket case.” But that doesn’t mean the suffering there, and in its regional neighbors, is unworthy of our attention.

In fact, it’s places like Bangladesh that will feel the effects of climate change most directly and in the most brutal terms. More floods seem inevitable.

Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian, pointed out that “a disparity in the global attention paid to these two natural disasters is hardly a novelty. It’s as old as the news itself …”

The same points have been made about terrorism – when it happens in the United States and Europe, alarm bells go off and the coverage is 24/7, but when it happens in Asia, Africa or the Middle East, it is accorded a cursory mention and quickly forgotten.

There’s no doubt that we do live in a global village, a notion that has been around since the 1960s, and we are more interconnected than ever. We can interact with a range of people that once would have been unimaginable and experience more of what other cultures and societies have to offer. But, in many ways, Americans remain at heart parochial. Fewer of us speak more than one language in comparison to those in other developed nations, and only 36 percent of us hold a passport, according to 2016 figures from the U.S. State Department. In contrast, 60 percent of Canadians have a passport, as do 75 percent of the British.

So, absolutely, we should open our hearts and wallets to the victims of Harvey. But we should keep in mind that other people in parts of the world that rarely draw our notice also deserve our compassion.

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