Updated 12/31/04 11:40 a.m. (see below)

com·pas·sion
n.

Deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it.

Two days ago I wrote about a San Diegan traveler who escaped the tsunami on the Thai island of Kho Phi Phi and then described the event on his travel weblog. Ivan commented that most people weren’t able to pick up the New York Times and face the macabre images of mutilated, bloated bodies. Beckie agreed saying, “I could not bring myself to buy it either.” Ivan also said that it wasn’t until he saw a video of the tsunami that “it gave the event an immediacy that I had been missing.” In other words, the video triggered the “deep awareness of suffering.” Over the past two days I have seen countless tourists and young couples come into my cafe and gasp at the images and headlines on the front pages of our newspapers. I have even seen some cry.

And I am profoundly jealous. Because I look at the gruesome frontpage photo of dead women and young children, their bodies stacked like airline baggage, and the singular thought that enters my brain is: “damn, look at all the sand in their ears and mouths.” There is little or no emotional response. In fact, I am sure that I had a greater emotional response to a sad scene in a movie I saw last weekend than Tuesday morning’s headline that more than 10,000 people had died in one single quake creating one monstrous wave. That number then climbed to 20,000, jumped to 40,000, doubled to 80,000, and as I write this Reuters has pushed the toll beyond 125,000. Those numbers, however, mean nothing to me. The fact that they represent individual livelihoods doesn’t register. Does not transform them from mere abstractions to be dissected by brutal mathematics.

Let’s say the final death toll reaches 200,000. That is 1/40^th the amount of people who died unnaturally in the Congo Free State from 1886 - 1908. 1/5^th the number dead from the Mexican Revolution. 1/8^th compared to the Armenian Massacre. At 200,000, the final count would still be less than China’s 1976 earthquake and not that much more than Bangladesh’s 1991 cyclone.

Blogger, federal judge, and author of Catastrophe: Risk and Response, Richard Posner says:

A disaster may occur only every 100 years and kill 40,000 people, but one way to think about it is, that’s an average of 400 people killed each year.

We would say 1,125 a year now. That’s about 1/15^th the amount who die in alcohol related car accidents each year in the US alone.

Damage estimates have also jumped. From initially just above a billion to now around 15 billion. What’s that? One third the piggy bank of Bill Gates. What is one third of my piggy bank? A hot dog and beer at a baseball game. What is one third the piggy bank of the average tsunami victim? Probably less than a starbucks coffee refill, grande.

President Bush offered $15 million in aid, was called stingy, and then upped the amount to $35 million, which as everyone is saying, is approximately the same amount that will be spent on his inaugaration and is approximately spent in Iraq every 4 hours. It is also a checkbook away for thousands of Americans, scores of Mexicans, and tens of thousands of citizens across the globe.

And so if I’m reminded of anything by “the tragedy,” it’s not how sad for all these dead people; it’s an incredible reminder of how institutionalized inequality is.

Why does John Schwartz of the NY Times call an international alarm system “complex and expensive?” Becuase, “an evacuation in Hawaii could cost $68 million in lost productivity. And imagine the collective cost if we all had to pay an extra dollar at Wal-Mart because the sweat shops got cleared out for a day due to a false alarm.

If you’re sensing cynicism, refrain from patting yourself on your back, this post is dripping in it. In all honesty, the global response to this giant wave seems surreal to me. There is so much attention, so much apparent compassion, so many donations coming from individuals and companies (though not the US government) and if I wasn’t as smart as I am, I would swear that people are actually starting to give a shit about each other.

But like I said, I am that smart, and I know this can’t really be. I look at these photos and like you I see suffering too. But, as Susan Sontag would be quick to point out if she wasn’t one more NY Times obituary already at the bottom of the green and blue recyle bins of the world, I have become completely immune to these images of suffering. Not only the pixels on my computer screen and the ink on my newspapers and the flashing images on the TV, but the actual faces, I have seen them too. I have walked through the crowds of malnourished homeless in Delhi’s train station. I have seen young children digging through trash in the shanties of rural Chile. And I have talked face to face with a beggar child in Kathmandu whose arm was hacked off by his uncle as a marketing ploy.

If suffering could be quantified this week’s earthquake and tsunami would have barely made a dent in any global index of pain and agony. If 60,000 people are announced dead in the Aceh province of Sumatra alone, that number does not come close to comparing with the hundreds of thousands of Acehenese whom have lost their lives to malnutrition, military occupation, and disease from unsanitation over the past decade. (for more info on the conflict in Aceh, listen to this broadcast of Democracy Now) In fact, as off the top as it may sound, part of me cannot help but wonder if this natural disaster is also a blessing in disguise in the form of social change and international commitment to bring peace to a region entrenched in suffering.

And so what I am saying is that this beautiful, glorious, compassionate response to Monday’s tsunami cannot be attributed solely to compassion, to a deep awareness of suffering, but must be based on a phenomenon altogether different. And I think that is connectivity and causality. The media and the entire world has responded to this disaster with so much excitement and philanthropy, not out of a sense of Buddhist compassion, but because we are high on the realization that we are all part of this. That finally, for once, we are all connected and that our actions “here” actually have consequences “there.”

This realization is important because it gives me just enough to grasp ahold of to turn my cynism into idealism. Because what if this temporary glee of a neighborly planet actually turns into a sustained understanding of our ecological inter-connectedness?

Throughout the day, I have been looking at Amazon’s Red Cross donation page. Every three or four hours the amount of donors jumps another 10,000 and the amount donated jumps another million and I am filled with hope. I am filled with hope because people are coming to their computer monitors and keyboards and they are informing themselves and they are donating the money they have worked hard for even if that was yesterday’s tips, for a cause on the other side of the world.

And what if this is the future?

What if we have just established, in the last three days, a culture of compassion which celebrates giving and cooperation and chastises the greed shown by those ridiculously wealthy billionaires who could end so much suffering by signing a single check?

“No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls.
It tolls for thee.”

John Donne - For Whom the Bell Tolls

Update:

John Schwartz, the author of a New York Times article I quoted on the complexity of implementing an international warning system just emailed me the following:

I was pleased to see my story quoted in your blog, but saddened by the interpretation you gave it. My story in no way said that warning systems are unnecessary, or that expense alone should keep nations from working together to develop better warnings and education systems. I in no way intended that to be the point of my story.

He is very much right. The way I quoted his article was misleading. The emphasis in lost productivity was my own, not his and it definitely doesn’t read that way.

Schwartz is also the author of the much-linked-to article describing blogs covering the tsunami. He is obviously familiar with the blogosphere and I can’t help but wonder why he chose to send me an email, rather than leaving a comment which would clarify his position for everyone. I have noticed this with other journalists who have contacted me as well - they always seem to be interested in what I write, but refuse to participate in the discussion. I have a hunch that many may be wary of starting a two way conversation.