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This was an amazing commmentary. Guy almost had me crying.
Dec. 28, 2004
Hearing and watching the news over the last few days has left most people numb. However many tens of thousands will have been killed following the earthquake-tsunami, there will be tens of hundreds of thousands more in mourning, houseless, stricken with disease and wracked with pain.
It is a monumental misery being endured by those peoples in the ring of countries where the devastation was most concentrated.
It should remind us here on the heels of Christmas in ways that are far too numerous to count that we, in what we call the West, are always on the top side of fortune's wheel. That whatever are the miseries or contentions of life, say, here in Canada, most of our misfortunes and conflicts are by comparison contracted and trivial. We're lucky, if that's the right word, to live in a part of the world where it's news if an airport is shut down because of a storm or there's a rash of fender benders after the first snowfall.
It is an axiom of this world that the worst things happen in the poorest places to people in the weakest circumstances. If you were born in the West, you've won the only lottery that really counts from the very first moment you take air. It's very early in the response to the calamity now unfolding, but not too early to ask what our country plans to do.
A natural disaster is a miserable combination of words, but a natural disaster does come with one single benefit... it is free of all the fogs of politics. There are just thousands and thousands of truly innocent people living a nightmare of pain, want, and dislocation. We Canadians like to cherish the notion that we are a right-feeling nation. Our present government has given signals that it sees itself and the country it governs as being an agency, a source of international conscience. This week's news is going to test that reputation. Are we going to be one of the countries which waits for others to propose response and action? Are we ready to deploy troops and money, both in substantial amounts, to do the charity — and that's the right word — that this monumental disaster calls for? Do we have them?
The Prime Minister has had photo ops with Bono, the tinsel of do-goodism lies over this government. Canadians themselves surely pride themselves on the idea that they, we, are a force for good in the world. After the news this week, only two things can happen... we will hear all the right noises from our government, all the low-voiced mumbling of concern and sympathy, the verbal equivalent of tearing up in public for the benefit of the world's cameras, or we will leap far beyond all conventional response and see in the catastrophic misery that is unfolding on the other side of the world an extraordinary responsibility for a country of our wealth and prosperity to make a response proportional to that wealth and that responsibility.
It may be the wrong end of the telescope to look at it this way, but the disaster and death that have visited the world in the interlude between Christmas and New Year's should be or must be the dread stimulus for the First World to begin paying some homage to the perpetual plight of those caught in the Third. There's still enough of the Christmas spirit left to remember 2004 for something more than its orgy of Boxing Day sales. And if an earthquake and a tsunami can't wake us out of the slumbers of complacency and prosperity, well then there's nothing that can. For "The National," I'm Rex Murphy.
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