We have a good friend in Japan, someone who first met my wife’s family when Amy was a kid and he was attending the School of Business at Indiana University. When news of the recent earthquake hit in the early AM, that is who I pictured.
Like many others, our thoughts turned quickly to helping. Thanks to the costs of higher education, we’re not in a particularly good place to give money at the moment, but it didn’t stop me from adding a little bit of info to the GeekDad list of ways to give to Japan. Technology, the speed of information, and the largeness of human hearts and wallets conspire more and more to make it easy to reach out in this way and feel a little less helpless.
Today, I read an interesting take on this reaction to global tragedy from Felix Simon of Reuters. The piece is a couple weeks old now, so I can imagine the reaction people would have reading his “Don’t Donate Money to Japan” headline just three days after the devastation. Actually, I don’t have to imagine because I can read the reaction in the comments, which seem to alternate between “Mr. Salmon, have some compassion!” and “Hey, commenter, you are missing the point!”
Simon makes an interesting case:
We went through this after the Haiti earthquake, and all of the arguments which applied there apply to Japan as well. Earmarking funds is a really good way of hobbling relief organizations and ensuring that they have to leave large piles of money unspent in one place while facing urgent needs in other places. And as Matthew Bishop and Michael Green said last year, we are all better at responding to human suffering caused by dramatic, telegenic emergencies than to the much greater loss of life from ongoing hunger, disease and conflict. That often results in a mess of uncoordinated NGOs parachuting in to emergency areas with lots of good intentions, where a strategic official sector response would be much more effective. Meanwhile, the smaller and less visible emergencies where NGOs can do the most good are left unfunded.
He goes on to argue that Japan’s wealth makes it possible for them to pay for the repair. Like the U.S.—and unlike many other nations—they have the financial capacity to raise their own money.
The sensationalism of the headline aside, Simon’s most compelling point is that we should be motivated by the big headlines to give, and give generously, to organizations that will get the money to areas that need it most. Specifically, he praises Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the medical humanitarian organization working to assist people whose daily survival is threatened.
While the point is well taken, I think there is something to be said for any behavior that looks outward and reminds us that we share the world. All of this interconnectedness through social media and prosumer content makes the world small. It is natural for news of tragedy to become a shared experience, one that prompts us to act. Small changes—like looking to Al Jazeera for international news, or thinking to donate to MSF next time—will eventually get us to a place where we can understand what it takes to survive another day on this planet in countries that don’t make the news.
