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Hurricane Katrina and Our World Judy Stillson | 8/29/05
As Hurricane Katrina, one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States, slammed into the Golf Coast early today we are awed by nature's unrelenting force and the role it plays in our lives.
Eons ago, primitives sought basic necessities - food, clothing, shelter - the last item being shelter from the harsh environment the world often presented. Humanity still seeks the basics of survival today, some more than others. The tsunami of December, 2004, the drought and starvation in West Africa, and now the portent of millions without basic needs being met within our own country are strikingly all similarly caused by nature, the force which we, in our enlightened and technologically-advanced culture, have yet to control or contain.
In West Africa untold thousands will starve from drought while a continent away, lives will be swept away by water. Our politicians will mourn the loss, our insurance companies will pay some disaster relief (and raise rates for the rest of us), but the matter remains - millions of people will end up displaced or homeless, destitute or near despair along our southern shores.
Our people will receive aid, support, media coverage and funds to rebuild. In West Africa, no such aid will be forthcoming, no media will venture into the parched lands of famine, no politician will declare it an emergency not because most Americans are a selfish people, but because our media is egocentric and ethnocentric, putting the needs and events of OUR nation first and the rest of the world somewhere behind that.
Our culture has instructed us that America is first and foremost in the world and that we matter more than some poor, dying savage in some distant, uncultivated land. That's an unfortunate effect of a slanted media and a fundamental flaw in the makeup of American culture. We are not alone in this world, nor are we atop it. Katrina may finally show us just how vulnerable we really are and how much we may need to depend on other nations, other people, other cultures.
The questions are whether we as a nation can learn from this harsh lesson and whether our politicians will see the light of cooperation outside conquest.
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