--- colin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > saw a half hour doc on 4 last night about the Bali > bombing. [...] > at the end, it was mentioned that many > Balinese were also > killed. The way it was delat with was like it wasn't > as tragic. > Certainly it was the first I had heard mention of > the Balinese. > I wonder if this is one of the reasons the West is > not that popular?
It's the first I've heard it mentioned too and, of course, it would be surprising if Balinese people *hadn't* been killed as well, just going by the odds. I haven't been following the stories closely though. I think people have a tendency of dissociating themselves from that sort of thing - is it a form of sociopathy, or is it self-defense (maybe it's the same thing). Sometimes the numbers and the situations are so overwhelming. You read of floods and earthquakes in Asia or the middle east where hundreds, even thousands, of people are killed and it's too mind-numbing to think about. Not just the numbers of people, but the forces of nature that most of us know nothing about in our part of the world. When it strikes closer to home, most people pay more attention because, wow, maybe it *could* happen here after all. I don't know about people in other parts of the world, but I think it's true that westerners, certainly in Canada and the US, tend to take it more personally if it happens to people like us. Which is tragic. I don't know if it's pure selfishness and that we (our media perhaps) tend to dehumanize people who aren't like us, or whether having terrible things happen to people like us makes it somehow *more* tragic for us. It would be interesting to see how stories about tragedies show up in other parts of the world. Reporters here are always looking for the personal angle in order to get readership (the "what's in it for me?" angle). Nevertheless, especially lately it seems, they overdo it on a big scale. They're always analyzing things to death with panels of so-called "experts" spewing off about what this means and what that means, and then regurgitating it and adding comments to the comments. To be honest, I rarely watch TV at all anymore, much less the news. I read the paper on weekends only and I try to read only the first few paragraphs of most stories, just to get the main news without all the trimmings. That's partly because I'm just so busy, and partly because I find there are times I just can't cope with reading more and more about the same damn things and I just can't trust what I read because I don't think there's any such thing as objective news anymore - if there ever was at all; maybe that's a myth too. ===== Catherine Toronto ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
