Hurricane Gustav
As I write this, Hurricane Gustav is lashing southern Louisiana with heavy rains and high winds. A few years after Katrina, there’ve been a few bits of good news to come out of the hurricane, not least of which is that residents of the affected areas have managed to evacuate ahead of the storm’s arrival.
But then there’s the dark lining to the silver cloud. Those winds and rains, while not as heavy as what hit NOLA in 2005, are still managing to overtop the same levees that broke that year, flooding the Ninth Ward. There will still be heavy damage to a city that has only begun to recover from the earlier disaster. And, yet again, the lives of those affected will be used to score political points and gain political capital; while it will be a welcome change not to see the administration repeat past mistakes, one would hope its successors-in-waiting would have the discretion and good sense not to replace these with a new litany.
There’s another problem that isn’t being talked about during the wall-to-wall coverage that Gustav has received, and will continue to receive: compassion fatigue. Loosely speaking, compassion fatigue occurs when individuals (or, by extension, a society) are repeatedly confronted with human suffering. At some point, feelings of helplessness, inadequacy, and lethargy set in, and people become numb to the suffering of others. While there’s a considerable amount of debate over compassion fatigue–its causes and symptoms, to say nothing of the best means by which to address it–it’s pretty hard to argue that the psychological landscape is ripe for it, and equally hard to argue against the fact that we’re seeing some form or other of it manifest in the last several years.
We’ve always lived in “interesting times,” to turn a proverb on its head. That said, our recent history seems especially troubled. The 9/11 attacks, Katrina, Rita, the Boxing Day tsunami, pervasive flooding in the American Midwest, quakes in Iran and China, and a host of other disasters both natural and manmade demand our attention with what would seem to be metronomic regularity. And we open our hearts–not to mention our wallets–to those less fortunate, just as regularly.
The end result? Charities that are often the first into affected areas are having a harder time soliciting funding. Whole areas affected by natural disasters go largely ignored by the national media (such as recent catastrophic flooding in Iowa). Resentment grows on the part of those overlooked toward those who’ve received the attention and donations, while those unaffected wonder why those who have won’t just bear their suffering quietly.
It’s easy to understand why this would happen. As mentioned above, the media plays no small part in this phenomenon, inundating us with images of the worst of the suffering; they’re also selective about whose suffering they choose to highlight. Fashionable as it is to blame the media, though, the blame doesn’t lay with the networks, dailies, and magazines alone. As individuals, we need also to be vigilant against the deadening of our own compassion, and the accompanying cynicism that turns us away from, or against, our neighbors precisely at the time they need our help the most.
Tags: 9/11, Gustav, hurricanes, Katrina, natural disasters, Rita, tsunami