As I sat waiting for my flight in Miami I watched fascinated as the world walked past. There is no other place like an airport to capture an image of the diversity and the idiosyncrasies of humanity. Here, in a (relatively) small place many of the different languages and cultures come together and interact together: we coexist together and whilst there might be much that we do not understand about each other - we are here - together.
So it was like nails on a blackboard when my brain realised what it had just heard on the television. It was an advertisement for a CNN special. A fairly famous CNN reporter (he had been in Haiti too) was now in Pakistan. Images of the reporter in a boat chugging down a swollen river with familiar images of devastation and frightened, wet and hungry people filled the screen as the narrator told us that coming soon was this man’s special report on the worst disaster the world has ever known and “its impact on the United States, and what it might mean for American interests”.
Now, I don’t want in any way to assume that this last phrase represents the reporter’s agenda, but I couldn’t help but be instantly furious. Maybe after just coming out of Haiti I am a little too sensitive: but seriously, is that what the important issue is – how a natural disaster and the suffering of over 20,000,000 people might impact the United States?
Are we humans really that selfish that in moments of crisis we are worried about how it might impact on me? My experience tells me that we aren’t! That whilst we do forget quickly, at the moment of crisis – even when we cannot possibly understand what it actually feels like - we look for ways to draw together, to unite and to share.
But it seems there will always be people, media, governments and religious fanatics (of all persuasions) that will try to capatalise even on tragedy to engender fear and to perpetuate difference all to further their own narrow agenda? (But maybe I am just a little hypersensitive and therefore too judgmental at the moment!)
