One could say that we may be getting overloaded with disaster news considering new reports of an earthquake hitting China on Monday, May 12, killing a massive number of people, in the wake of the current disaster ensuing in Burma.
Not to call anyone emotionless or unsympathetic, but continuously hearing about disasters on a frequent basis means that there is the possibility that the degree of empathy we can demonstrate is minimal. Not, of course, that this is because we don’t have hearts but because the numbers of casualties are much too high to qualify for deep-seated emotional thoughts.
I am genuinely reluctant to believe that people now just view casualties as faceless statistics and, that when we see news about some 10,000 people who have died as a result of an earthquake or other disaster, we are not moved.
I think that some of us are distraught about such events but, although those affected are unlucky, we have to continue our lives and not be drowned in the sadness of the event. This is a perfectly justified reasoning considering that we do not personally know these people and that they are many, many miles away from us.
It also the distance between us and the casualties that might cause us to process disasters as these faceless statistics. A blameless act, because there is no way, realistically, that we can process the death of a best friend in the same way as the death of 10,000 people in Burma or China. First of all, we cannot attribute a face to each casualty, nor can we know of their interests and likes, as we can for a best friend. It is in this context that casualties in disaster news can become merely numbers without a face.
I think that many people are empathetic to such news as far as they can possibly be, yet maybe by the end of a week of hearing the news of such disasters, the casualties do become nothing more than numbers to us. This sounds like we are a bunch of unemotional beings, but it is unrealistic and completely naïve for anyone to think otherwise. Whilst I do not agree with the phrase ‘one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic’, I do seem to find some unnerving truth in its meaning. Unnerving because we seem powerless, and cannot help but treat massive deaths as numbers, which is of course how disasters are broadcasted on television to us: a disaster has struck and a huge number of people have died.
This is not to say we don’t care, because I think we do, but the extent to which we can care seems like a speck of sand upon a huge beach. I do not think it is our wish to feel less empathy than is our full capacity for these casualties, but it is just impossible to mourn for 10,000 dead people as frequently as we hear of disasters
Perhaps it is for this reason that a lot of us are more than willing to give aid when required, in order to assuage this lack of sentiment.
