31.12.2004
Asia Tsunami Nastiness
Or alternatively, how lucky are we? One of the great things about living in Australia is the beach but this has a downside (well, a few actually: global climate change causing the sea levels to rise will be interesting within my lifetime and lets not talk about skin cancer) that most of us live close to the sea (obviously enough). Having a holiday away like this in the little weekend shack is lovely but it is very close to the sea. So much so that when you see some of the footage, it is not nice to realise that if it had happened here, this house would just be a memory.
Doing my daily bit of internet browsing I came across some interesting (and thought provoking) links from a site in the UK (that linked to John’s site). The two particular days that made me think were a discussion on how much Britain spent on Christmas and the other was the fact that he had donated to the tsunami relief effort. So I toddled off to worldvision and did what I should have done a couple of days ago and donated.
The tricky thing about “donor fatigue” or whatever you want to call it, is that the West (or the rich nations) are always asked to donate funds to events like this - but why shouldn’t we? We have the money, we have the ability and in this era of flagrant consumerism, will we even notice the difference at the end of the month (ie what ever we actually do donate)? But a counter argument is that, for example, India spends rather a lot of money building up its nuclear ability, Indonesia has a very modern airforce (far better than Australia’s), so shouldn’t they spend that money? I have no idea what the answer is but it does tend to raise questions (and questions make people less likely to give - in my opinion anyway).