How the poor have fallen, how have the mighty given?

Tsunami have always fascinated me and I've spent many an hour digging up photos and videos of them. I've always been able to separate the physical event from the death and destruction that they so often wreck. But that is no longer the case having seen the rows and rows of bodies laid out in streets, hospitals, school buildings, in pits for burial. When such numbers of dead are reported piecemeal over weeks, months and years, or abstractly as a statistic its hard to get a grasp on the sheer scale of human misery. The images from around the Indian ocean really bring home the sheer magnitude of destruction the tsunami caused along thousands of miles of coast line. I doubt I'll ever think about tsunami again without those images flashing to the front of my mind.

So I have to say, as the cynic I am, that I was appalled last night that the US had promised $15 million in aid for the countries affected by the tsunami. Immediately I thought about how the USA is spending $1 billion a week in Iraq - that's $142 million a day, and all we can spare is $15 million? Sure those countries are not affluent Western countries, their damages in dollar value may end up been lower than those caused by the last hurricane season in Florida. However the scale of human misery is surely immeasurable by comparison and the US had a great opportunity to demonstrate world leading benevolence with a large and generous donation.

This morning, having clearly endured much criticism from overseas, the US added another $20 million to their donation. That still is clearly a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed. Granted the US is not the only wealthy country in the world, but that donation still only represents about 10 cents per person in our country. How about our government dig deep and find at least $1 per person? And how about we pledge to use all our technological know-how to help the countries around the Indian Ocean to set up a tsunami warning system such as we have protecting our own tsunami vulnerable Pacific shores.

The buoys used to detect tsunami mid-ocean cost about $250,000 each and we operate six in the Pacific. Just think of the difference it would have made if the many hours of warning available had been used to alert the coastal populations in Sri-Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, India and even Africa. What a triumph of technology that could have been and what a tragic failure it was. In this season of giving and good will to all men, not just our people, wouldn't that be the right thing to do?