The Self-Centred West

I generally don't rant much about the West, since I grew up here, but I gotta tell ya, people living in North America (and by extension I think I can say Western Society in general, irrespective of geography) are so self-absorbed in their own little bubble that they don't give a rat's ass about the rest of the world, save some popular media or celebrity-highlighted causes, which seem fashionable, particularly to the youth of this generation.

You know, I don't really have much of a philosophical dichotomy when it comes to the value of life. Which is why I do not put people on a sliding scale of life worth - the death of a celebrity does not resonate any more with me than a death of an unknown homeless person. It wasn't always this way, but over the years, I've developed a real distaste for how North American culture focuses on such trite things, yet at the same time, have a scale of life-worth that essentially pits fame and fortune with innate value. Now, I am not some crazy new-age, feely-touchy type who will say that all life is valuable. Clearly that is not the case, with guys like Paul Bernardo and the guy in Texas on death row who is the next to be executed for his part in the brutal rapes and murders of two teenagers - to me, these guys aren't human. Rather, my contention is that in general, human life has value.

So obviously my heart grieves when I hear that 10,000 people were killed today in an earthquake in China, a large magnitude earthquake at that (7.8 on the Richter scale). I mean, if you look at 9/11, there was something like 2800 lives lost. That was sad, and continues to be. I can't even visualize that many people. And sure, it has greater shock value when life is deliberately taken by way of a terrorist act. You'd have to have been hiding in a cave (hopefully not Bin Laden's) to not realize that there was an inordinate amount of press and media coverage for 9/11 and the subsequent deaths that occurred. Yet, for all this coverage, you hear what would amount to passing news almost on a daily basis of people who are dying everyday in other parts of the world - and make no mistake, North America does not have a monopoly on terrorist activities. Whether it is suicide bombers in the Middle East killing innocent people, or those in developing country who are starving to death, while we sit in North America and bitch and moan about how our freaking Blackberries are down for a day, I really do think that the West has such a self-absorbed mentality that it fails to even register why the rest of the world hates us so much.

On many discussion boards, today's tragedy is given passable coverage. Could you imagine if this was in North America? CNN would have full-screen pictures with a tabloid style headline and people would stop what they are doing and chime in on how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Yet, when it's "them", that is people on the other side of the world, which for all intents and purposes, are different than you, or who have no real relation to you, geographic, political, or linguistic, then I guess the blase response would be, "well, these things happen", and worse, for those who tend to have a North American brainwashed mindset, coupled with some pretty ingrained religious beliefs, they simply chalk it up to "God's will" and something to do with the end times. It's almost as if there is a sort of acceptable resignation that these things happen and "oh well". Yet if this happened in Toronto, or New York, or L.A., or any manner of small towns in North America, it would be considered unnatural, a great tragedy, and you'd hear politicians blabbering away prayers and such for the victims. If it happens on the other side of the world, well...nobody gives a (fill in the blank here).