Acts Of God

.
The catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean has
prompted the greatest international response since
the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s. Governments
have pledged at least $5.5 billion in assistance,
and individuals and corporations have promised
an additional $2 billion.

The response is gratifying; I hope and pray that it
sets a lasting precedent. At the same time, I wish
that we cared about the victims of the acts of man
as much as we do for the victims of the so-called
"acts of God." "Acts of God" are what insurance
companies call natural disasters -- beyond our
control and, thus, beyond legal redress.

While natural disasters may shock us, the man-
made catastrophes often claim many more victims.
The death toll from human evil has been in the millions
-- far exceeding that from the tsunami. For example,
the conflict that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia
alone claimed at least 200,000 lives.

The new movie HOTEL RWANDA reminds us of
the genocidal killings that claimed at least 800,000
lives in that country in 1994. And how many Americans
know that Somalia, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and Zaire,
among others, have also experienced man-made
catastrophes whose victims number in the hundreds
of thousands?

Then there's the Sudan. The world shrugged at
comparable death tolls in that country: victims
of a twenty-year-plus effort to impose Islamic
law on a largely Christian population in the South.

What makes this indifference so maddening is that,
after the discovery of Nazi concentration camps,
the world swore that it wouldn't happen again.
Genocide became a "crime against humanity";
yet for the most part, the world has stood
silently by.

Why? Partly, it's a question of "out of sight,
out of mind." Public reaction, for better or
for worse, is driven by images in the media.
Just as images of starving children prompted
the Ethiopian response, coverage of the
tsunamis on CNN and Fox moved people
to action.

Unfortunately for their victims, perpetrators
of genocide know better than to let trucks
marked "CNN" roll into their killing fields,
even if the press tried to -- which few did
in the Sudan. And without arresting images,
a media-driven culture finds it easy to ignore
even the most reliable eyewitness accounts
of atrocities. MORE: http://xrl.us/eqxp