Reply #11: we're not the only ones who do it [View All]

[Retrograde]

Every country tends to focus on its own: on yesterday's BBC and ITV coverage there were interviews with British survivors arriving at Heathrow, NHK news (Japan) was reporting on the number of Japanese in the affected area (as far as my rather limited Japanese could make out), the French paper La Liberation has the headline "At Least 22 French Killed" on its homepage, etc. Closer to home, the San Jose Mercury-News has extensive coverage on India and Sri Lanka because of the large Indian and Sri Lankan communities in the area, and nary a mention of Africa.

It brings the tragedy home, in a sense: it gives us people we can more easily relate to. Every death does diminish us, but it's hard for us as not-really-all-that-evolved tribal animals to get our minds around 50,000 dead strangers: they're statistics, as someone once said under different circumstances. Hearing about Ms Smith from my state, or the family of Adil who works in the next cube brings it down to a level we can more easily comprehend.