Where was God in the Tsunami?
by Marc Gafni
A very good question to which we will return; first, however, we need to realize that in many ways this question is a cover up for what might be the more essential question: Where was man in the Tsunami? We have spent trillions of dollars to develop methods of destroying the earth a thousand times over; one less missile system would have been sufficient to develop an early warning system in the ocean that could have saved almost all of the victims. Where was man in the Tsunami?
Where was god in the holocaust we ask; a good question, but a better one might be, Where was man?
While the labor Zionist focused on the “future,” the building of a state, and American Jews were largely silent, 12,000 Jews a day were gassed in Auschwitz. Where was man in the holocaust?
It is for this reason that it is difficult for me to understand my humanist friends who say that, After the Tsunami or after the holocaust I can no longer believe in God. It seems to me much more difficult to believe in man!
There is also a much deeper issue that the Tsunami covers up; an issue I understood more clearly in a conversation with my good friend, Michael Lerner.
The question that we need to ask is — why did the Tsunami get so much coverage; why did it make such waves. Now you may think that this is an obscene question; 150,000 people died a terrible death; 80,000 more are still missing in Indonesia. Of course the attention of the world should be focused on the Tsunami. While this is true it may also be that the focus on the Tsumani is a way of avoiding what may even be far more pressing issues. Four weeks ago the United Nations issues a report on child mortality. It told of a world — our world today – in which 29,000 children die EVERY DAY of malnutrition and avoidable diseases. That means that TEN MILLION CHILDREN DIE EVERY YEAR NEEDELESSLY. I burst into tears as I wrote the sentence…
It seems like there are two major reasons why the Tsunami is covered so intensely while world wide starvation of children of far greater proportions hardly merits attention; the first is unbelievably sad: While news shows pretend to transmit the reality of what is happening in the world – in reality they do not do so. Television news is a profit-making venture that is sadly driven by ratings. The way to seduce viewers into watching the news night after night is not to provide in-depth analysis or even in-depth information; it is to provide entertainment. The nightly news in virtually the entire world has become an entertainment. Entertainment is connected to drama and hype. A Tsunami that seems to come out of nowhere – for the first time in seven hundred years in that region – and which with crashing waves wreaks destruction and death is both highly dramatic and in a perverse sense – hugely entertaining.
Entertainment of course does not mean fun. It means that which rivets our attention, causes a rush of adrenalin, and in a completely addictive fashion seduces us back for more and more. In all of these senses, massive coverage of an event like the Tsunami answers the agenda of television entertainment with its hidden desire to foster addiction to news hype in order to boost rating in order to increase the financial profit of the corporate owners. If you have any question whether this is true, just ask yourself what – if not hype rating and profit – drove the obsessive coverage of the OJ Simpson murder trial or the Bill Clinton Monica Lewinsky; do we really all need to know the nature of the oral sex between Mr. Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky? Who cares? 29,000 children dying every single day does not accomplish the same goals; anything that happens every day seems to the shallow producers of television less dramatic and harder to hype – less entertaining and thus less addictive. Hence ten million children dying every year gets scant attention.
There is, however, a second reason as well and this is probably even more important. The reason that it is easy to report on the Tsunami and not on world hunger. It is easy because we place the Tsunami in the category of a natural disaster, what insurance companies in the United States call “an act of God”. Furthermore its very unusual nature allows people to mobilize and send support and relief to the victims and to feel like they are making a difference. The daily starvation of children, however, is very clearly not a natural disaster nor an act of God. It is abundantly clear that there are sufficient resources in the world to easily feed every single human being. There are many reasons that this does not happen. One of them is that the United States and the seven industrial nations consume forty percent of the world’s resources. Another is that globalization policies in the west serve to exploit markets and turn them into consumers of western goods rather then helping them become independent. Third, and a reason too often ignored by the liberal community, is that the ethics and values of many of the developing countries are non —democratic and too often mired in cruelty and corruption. So the world — its citizens — bears a very direct responsibility for the daily death of 29 thousand children. The news media is either controlled by large corporations who participate in the legal rape of the worlds resources, or it is controlled by despotic governments who run their countries to sustain their own power, failing to create conditions in which the prosperity that alleviates starvation could thrive.
So why would these two groups allow for extensive coverage of world hunger; it would only serve to indict themselves. Finally, the citizens of the world have stopped caring on the inside of their heart. It is not that they are evil. It is just that it is too painful sometimes for people to care about what they feel they cannot change. So people radically narrow their circle of caring, limiting it to family and a few close friends. We can handle an occasional Tsunami, but not the lifelong responsibility of children starving every day.
It is the sacred responsibility of the news media to reverse this situation. To begin to tell us – every day – the story of the hunger of the 29 thousand innocent who die daily. Let us see their faces, feel the stinging of their tears, and live with their starvation-crazed cries for relief and redemption. Tell us their stories; let us see their faces; help us to realize that wealth needs to be re-distributed; that we need to expand our circle of caring in order to retain our very humanity.
-Marc Gafni
