Myanmar mess

Fixed. Because clearly there are some who do.

 

Too tired to dig up Mizzou's posts on the 2004 tsunami, but I do wonder if he was singing the same tune then.

 

I cared a little about that one... Just a little...

 

Boy, has this line been beaten into the ground.
On September 10, 2001, nobody gave a rat's ass about Afghanistan.
A day later, it was of some concern to us.

 

My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a 15 year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims, like he invented the question mark. Sometimes, he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy - the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical: summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring, we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent, I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds. Pretty standard, really.

 

The coverage I've seen has focused on things like the junta and Al Gore. There's been shockingly little describing the scope of this and what an extraordinarily huge event it is.

Katrina was covered like the greatest natural disaster of our lifetime, and to a great extent justifiably so. But the total death toll caused by Katrina in all states was around 1800. This will be more than 250 TIMES larger than that, but hardly anyone's ackowledged it.

 

A lot of that can be chalked up to the junta not allowing anyone in.

But it's true, the human scope of the tragedy seems secondary.

 

OK...

What's a bigger mess, print journalism or Myanmar?

Discuss...

 

Since the junta isn't letting anyone in, any media can't put a face on the disaster. I feel badly for those people. Many of the survivors will die longer and more painful deaths than those swept away in the storm surge. I wouldn't be opposed to US-led humanitarian aid drops (no matter what the junta thinks about it), but the pressure to let foreign aid workers in will have to come from China. By then, if it's not already, it will be too late.

Sad. Just one more reason that despite its faults, I thank God I live where I do.

 

If they won't let us in, what are we supposed to do?

Maybe China can help them out.

 

It's Bush's fault. Don't you people know that?
Everything is Bush's fault. Everything is America's fault.

 

Umm...go in anyway?

And one has to wonder what the global effect of all this disease and death will be. By ignoring this, we could be very well be providing a fertile ground for the massive launch of something like the bird flu or some other kind of plague.