What Mother Nature Reveals
Anyone who knows me, knows I'm a news junkie. It's like I need my daily fix. I don't know how I would live without the internet. It's the greatest invention next to electricity. All the news in the world is available online...how great is that? I can spend hours scouring the net for news from around the world. The great thing about it is being able to get news from so many different sources.
Since the devastating destruction of Hurricane Katrina, I've been glued to all the news online and on tv about the horrible losses and conditions people have had to endure in its aftermath. It is so tragic and to think that so many people could have been saved is even more tragic. I can only imagine what the survivors are going through after losing everything they had and having to rebuild their lives from the beginning.
It's quite a shame that our own government was unable to provide the amount of help needed for its own citizens in a swift manner. I'm sure the discussion about the government's response to relief efforts will continue for a long time as the blame game has already started among politicians.
A week ago no one would have thought that a hurricane would spark discussions on race and class. Certainly the poor suffered the most since in many of the cases they had no means of escaping the storm. Whether or not race played a role in the government's slow response will be debated upon for a long time.
I was surprised to find out that the infant mortality rate in D.C. is twice as high as in Beijing. Shocking, really. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times provides some hard numbers on infant mortality rates in the U.S. compared to other countries in the world if you like to read more about it.
The last time I was in China about three years ago I had seen the poverty in Guangzhou. Particularly the number of children that roamed the streets at night carrying infants begging for money. The children who couldn't have been more than 10 or 12 years old were often seen taking care of infants. No parents or guardians in sight. It was heartbreaking and shocking. All I could think about was how can the government allow this to happen to their own children? I find myself asking the same question here in my own country.
