Terri Schiavo, meet the crises in Darfur

[Mookieisms]

I have been away for a while but I have been encouraged to maybe become active. I wrote this about 3 weeks ago after being angered by the innumerable "Save Darfur" Facebook donation groups. I doubt this will go responded to, seeing as how most of my posts go the way of being forgotten, but it is a decent read for anyone interested and criticism is greatly appreciated considering I havn't really heard a dissenting viewpoint.

So the media has decided to allow another nation into the contemporary places that they feel matter; Sudan. Sudan joins the select group of The United States, Mexico, England, Iraq, and fading out of the picture; Afghanistan. These are the only nations or regions that mass media, American Culture, and Hollywood feel important enough to catch headlines, the other 185 or so countries are destined forever at the spot at the bottom of the newscasts called a “ticker”. Indonesia was once worthy of being included in the Mediagraphy, but their limelight faded when people stopped dying. Time to move on to more important things like Natalie Halloway!

Lets get real. The whole purpose of this rant is to highlight the farce of popular culture, mainstream media, and the general public grabbing at sensational stories. There are two types of fads; the first consists of some hot button topic, whether it be global warming, illegal immigration, and even globalization. Most of these hot button topics are applicable to people at home and almost everyone garners strong opinions towards making its discussion rather justifiable and constructive in terms of changing policy or making a difference. If you disagree with your states emissions testing as being too lax, you can go to your congress. If you live in a border county that isn’t strict enough on illegal immigrants, you can petition and go to the city board. If you don’t like standardization of the economy, you can create grassroots movements to preserve your city’s unique identity and way of life. These are all fine. Every once and a while a hot button topic comes up that nobody can really do anything about and talking about them trivializes the situation and leads to no constructive action. The hot button topic of late is the Crises in Darfur, which I’ll get to later. The second type of fad concerns one specific, conditional instance of a family, individual, or group of individuals is being disenfranchised, abducted, or displaced. Instances that come to mind are the attempted adoption of Elian Gonzalez, the abduction and subsequent murder of Natalie Halloway, dubbed by the media as “Hurricane Aruba”, and basically any other sob story that Nancy Grace decides is worth her airtime. Nancy Grace irritates me to no end, but that’s for another day. This essay will primarily focus on the first type of sensationalism, with the second succumbing to the same flaws as the first.

A little background on the Darfur conflict. Darfur, for all of those unaware, is a region in Western Sudan where rival factions are jocking for position. The power struggle has left the denizens of the region in shambles; murder, displacement, and general anarchy governed only by military fist. The conflict was building up over time and spilled over in 2003, reaching its worst point in 2006 where an estimated 200,000-400,000 people murdered and another 2.5 million displaced. The conflict is terrible, that isn’t disputed. I empathize with the people that live their and the conditions of their existence that rests completely out of their own control. The International Community can’t do much to stop it because peace agreements don’t fly with radical groups.

So Kevin? Darfur is bad, we get it, but why the hell are you writing this? I have a few beefs. The first is in the late 1980’s a famine racked the region and brought the deaths of appromixmately 100,000 people and aided in completely destroying the infrastructure of an already fragile nation. I would bet the media didn’t report on any of this because the media doesn’t report on famines that are currently happening, and that’s with the aid of satellite communication, the internet, and the means to get anywhere on the planet in the blink of an eye! It is said that the famine and subsequent breakdown of civilization and the region helped contribute to the conflict that is currently taking place. Had more attention been paid to this famine, then the deaths of a hundred thousand wouldn’t have been in vain. Instead, the global community and mass media turn a blind eye to stories that aren’t sensational. I mean, really, who wants to read or hear about people dying of starvation? Think of it this way, would you want to watch a movie where all that happened was people laying around, not drinking and eating, then eventually dying because it won’t rain and crops won’t go? No. The media works on the same logic, it won’t put news on the air that won’t garner viewers. No one in America cared, or knew about Darfur for that matter, before the story was sensationalized by famous people who “understood” the plight of those in the region. The story of violence isn’t unknown. It happens everyday, but once violence is narrated, it tugs at our heartstrings and makes people feel guilty or obligated to help a seemingly unsolvable problem.

Massive violence is much more entertaining to watch, as horrible as that sounds. As the sensation of the story rises, so does the attention. Here is one more analogy to hammer the point home, in case that one was too insensitive. Hurricane Katrina took the lives of around 900 people and destroyed a major city, leaving hundreds of thousands of refugees. To compensate, we are all familiar with the government efforts of providing food, shelter, and credit cards to all families affected. Sounds rosy, right? Wrong. That money had to come from somewhere. Hundreds of thousands of people die everyday from cancer and terminal illness in cold, damp hospital rooms under the watch of a few family members and close friends. Not very sensational. Everyone seems to forget these deaths and labels them as another statistic. There are treatments over the horizon that could prevent and react to many of these fatalities, but money is aggregated towards a sensationalist public opinion where their tax dollars “really do something”. It is stated that billions of dollars were funneled from cancer, diabetes, and heart disease research to provide a substantially fewer number of effected people proper food and clothing. There is nothing wrong with that, but the fact that charities and government funding is dictated by sensationalist media is, to me, astounding and sets to disenfrachize the larger majority so a minute minority can have their time to shine. The last analogy that can be used is Terri Schiavo, the vegetative woman who was sustained for over 10 years by her husband while the family fought through the courts to let her rest in peace. Hundreds of thousands of people were and are currently in that same comatose state. Do you hear anything about them now? No. It isn’t sensational. There is no flash, bangs, or drama, therefore no reporting. And a final point to hit it home, how many times do you see news programming on how thousands of planes landed safely today? Never, that is unless a plane had an emergency landing or the unfortunate event of a plane crash.

The analogies purpose serves to expose the mindset of the general public. It is this mindset that will perpetuate genocides and famines. It is this mindset that is inherently harmful to the general public and beneficial only towards the ratings and money that is funneled to media outlets. I will refer to Nassim Nicholas Talib in his beautifully constructed book, The Black Swan, to explain why this is. (A black swan is the occurance if something completely unexpected, whether it be winning the lottery, being hit by a meteor, or being involved in a massive car wreck. It is the unexpected that plagues us in daily life, yet none of us ever dream that “it could happen to us”.)

“There are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear on television , and b) those nobody talks about, since they escape models, those that you would feel ashamed discussing in public because they do not seem plausible. I can safely say that it is entirely compatible with human nature that the incidences of Black Swans would be overestimated in the first case, but severely underestimated in the second one. Indeed, lottery buyers overestimate their chances of winning because they visualize such a potent payoff- in fact, they are so blind to the odds that they treat odds of one in a thousand and one in a million as almost the same.”

This is important because we as a culture care more about the narratives of Natalie Hollaway, Terri Schiavo, and Darfur even though there are hundreds of thousands of Natalie Hollway and Terri Schiavo-esque stories and dozens of potential and occurring Darfurs. The media plays on our craving for the qualitative product of sensationalism while neglecting the overwhelming quantitative majority. There are inherent problems with this mindset, which I will explain through Talib later on.

Right now lets focus on Darfur. I have already hinted that Darfur could have been prevented had the famine been lessened and measures been taken to restore infrastructure, but due to the “boring” nature of the situation nothing was done. This exact same scenario is taking place all across the World as we speak, yet nothing is being done to prevent these situations from tipping from mild catastrophes to systemic breakdowns of an entire region! Noone cares about the civil war that has been taking place in Sri Lanka for the last 50 years, noone cares about the systematic denial of rights of Kurdish citizens in Syria (not any different than segregation and discrimination of the late 1800’s in America), the international community doesn’t seem to mind that the slave trade in Mauritania is alive and well, attention isn’t paid to the continuing crises and conflict between ethnic groups in Burma and the media turns a blind eye to the systemic torture and lack of a justice system, then subsequent denial of rights, in the nation of Bangledesh. There are hundreds of other instances currently taking place, all of which could spiral out of control and turn into another “darfur”. We must change our mindset from simply reacting to problems and work towards preventing them. If the unexpected suddenly becomes the expected, then the problem can be prevented. Talib iterates

“Think of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: had the risk been reasonably conceivable on September 10th, it would not have happened. If such a possibility were deemed worthy of attention, fighter planes would have circled the sky above the twin towers, airplanes would have had locked bulletproof doors, and the attack would not have taken place, period. Something else might have taken place. What? I don’t know.

Consider the Pacific Tsunami of December 2004. Had it been expected, it would not have caused the damage it did- the areas affected would have been less populated, an early warning system would have been put in place. What you know cannot really hurt you”.

So instead of pledging money, wearing shirts, and sporting backpack patches to “free Darfur”, prevent Darfur from ever escalating to that level of masscare by reacting to the famine that happened decades earlier. Instead of investing time reacting to a situation that is truly out of the hands of any singular person, or even a group, or multinational organization, invest time in bringing attention to the civil war in Sri Lanka, the slavery in Mauritania, and the rampant discrimination in Syria before it escalates to crises levels.

The final note is the disservice we pay to ourselves and the harm that this mindset causes us in our daily life. I will leave you with a narrative from Talib:

“ The Italian Toddler. In the late 1970s, a toddler fell into a well in Italy. The rescue team could not pull him out of the hole and the child stayed at the bottom of the well, helplessly crying. Understandably, the whole of Italy was concerned with his fate; the entire country hung on the frequent news updates. The child’s cries produced acute pains of guilt in the powerless rescuers and reporters. His picture was prominently displated on magazines and newspapers, and you could hardly walk in the center of Milan without being reminded of his plight.

Meanwhile, the civil war was raging in Lebanon, with an occasional hiatus in the conflict. While in the midst of their mess, the Lebanese were also absorbed in the fate of the child. The Italian Child. Five miles away, people were dying from the war, citizens were threatened with car bombs, but the fate of the Italian child ranked high among the interests of the population in the Christian quarter of Beirut. ‘Look how cute that poor thing is’, I was told. And the entire town expressed relief upon his eventual rescue.

As Stalin, who knew something about the business of mortality, supposedly said,’ One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.’ Statistics stay silent in us.

Terrorism kills, but the biggest killer reminds the environment, responsible for close to 13 million deaths annually. But terrorism causes outrage, which makes us overestimate the likelihood of a potential terrorist attack, and react more violently to one when it happens. We feel the sting of man-made dangers far more than that caused by nature.”