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I sat down to read my twitter feed why my work laptop synched.
From @mactavish: "there ya go RT @chrysantheee: #Haiti is in my thoughts and agnostic prayers."
Haiti is often in my thoughts, as an attender at our meeting has befriended a community there and travels there often to teach and help find solutions to improve their lives. She shares stories of just what poor means when we describe Haiti as poor. She shares photos. She reads emails from her friends there, describing just what travel and effort is needed to get down out of the hills to where there is electricity and internet connections.
After seeing another tweet mentioning Haiti, i realized something new must have happened: the reason to keep the situation in Haiti in mind must be more immediate than the long term horrors. A very late/early hurricane? Please not another coup, a massacre of a crowd.... I did a news search to discover the reports of the magnitude 7+ earthquake.
Google has some sort of dynamic view of the latest reports inline with the regular results. This caught my eye: "Why is the natural disaster in Haiti news when the economic and humanitarian disaster that exists the other 364 days a year isn't?" said @kbaley (twitter.com, located in the Bahamas). I know why it's *news,* the question for me might be the concern. And even then, it's not Haiti, it's our cultural response. If there's a family barely scraping by in your area, that's not news. Our culture, for better or worse, "accepts" status quo. We may be involved in to creating and supporting programs or social structures that improve the status quo, but it's "too much" to hear about the status quo day in day out. Disaster is defined as "a sudden event," and it is that dramatic, sudden shift in the status quo that triggers that sudden generous concern.
Is that human nature? Cultural conditioning? I rather think it's the later. I think of Dogo Barry Graham's recent blog post:
I don't think Barry is teaching against human nature, just against our cultural conditioning. It's a deep conditioning.... And just like the expert in religious law asked, "Who is my neighbor?", i find myself asking what does it mean to "see" someone. With my own eyes?
I suspect i know how the storyteller might answer in this age of interconnection.
From @mactavish: "there ya go RT @chrysantheee: #Haiti is in my thoughts and agnostic prayers."
Haiti is often in my thoughts, as an attender at our meeting has befriended a community there and travels there often to teach and help find solutions to improve their lives. She shares stories of just what poor means when we describe Haiti as poor. She shares photos. She reads emails from her friends there, describing just what travel and effort is needed to get down out of the hills to where there is electricity and internet connections.
After seeing another tweet mentioning Haiti, i realized something new must have happened: the reason to keep the situation in Haiti in mind must be more immediate than the long term horrors. A very late/early hurricane? Please not another coup, a massacre of a crowd.... I did a news search to discover the reports of the magnitude 7+ earthquake.
Google has some sort of dynamic view of the latest reports inline with the regular results. This caught my eye: "Why is the natural disaster in Haiti news when the economic and humanitarian disaster that exists the other 364 days a year isn't?" said @kbaley (twitter.com, located in the Bahamas). I know why it's *news,* the question for me might be the concern. And even then, it's not Haiti, it's our cultural response. If there's a family barely scraping by in your area, that's not news. Our culture, for better or worse, "accepts" status quo. We may be involved in to creating and supporting programs or social structures that improve the status quo, but it's "too much" to hear about the status quo day in day out. Disaster is defined as "a sudden event," and it is that dramatic, sudden shift in the status quo that triggers that sudden generous concern.
Is that human nature? Cultural conditioning? I rather think it's the later. I think of Dogo Barry Graham's recent blog post:
When it's cold and you see a homeless person without a coat, and you're wearing a coat, ask yourself if you have another coat in your closet at home. If the answer is yes, which it is for all of you, take off the coat you're wearing and give it to the person who has no coat.
As soon as you heard that, you started to think about what coat you might be wearing, a favorite coat - probably an expensive one - that you don't want to part with. That doesn't matter. Give them the coat, no matter what coat it is, because it's not yours. If you have another coat at home, the coat you're wearing doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the coatless person shivering in the street. If you continue to wear the coat, remember that it's a stolen coat. That person is shivering because you stole their coat.
I don't think Barry is teaching against human nature, just against our cultural conditioning. It's a deep conditioning.... And just like the expert in religious law asked, "Who is my neighbor?", i find myself asking what does it mean to "see" someone. With my own eyes?
I suspect i know how the storyteller might answer in this age of interconnection.
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