Help victims…everywhere

So, the tsunami came, a lot of peo­ple died and now peo­ple all over the world are help­ing the best they can. Which is great. The blo­gos­phere has proven its worth once again, com­ing up with var­i­ous cre­ative ways of rais­ing money.

What is quite a prob­lem how­ever, is that while a true dis­as­ter, the tsunami isn’t nowhere near our biggest global prob­lem when it comes to peo­ple in need. “Africa? Yeah, I know, but they’ve been like dying since the eight­ies, right? Aren’t they more used to it?” So, while help­ing Asia, please keep in mind, that more peo­ple could use some help as well.

Media cov­er­age rules. Media cov­er­age needs pic­tures and sto­ries. Sad but true — and a bit under­stand­able. Goal for 2005: Why not see if we can get the same trac­tion focused on other impor­tant issues? We need good sto­ries, oth­er­wise the ‘blog­ging thing’ seem mis­placed? No, we make stories.

Update: After finally read­ing today’s Infor­ma­tion I’m shocked and sad­dened to learn that most of the promised con­tri­bu­tions by dif­fer­ent coun­tries, the UN etc., often don’t make it to the receiv­ing coun­tries. Call me naive, but I sort of thought most it got there… For instance, after the 2003 earth­quake in Bam less than 2% of the money promised were actu­ally payed mean­ing that no rebuild­ing has really taken place. If this is true, there’s a much bet­ter way to help than to donate small amounts your­self: Just make sure your gov­ern­ment prac­tice what they preach. Here, the estab­lished media could make a dif­fer­ence; they got the resources to reseach, fol­low up etc. And I don’t like my tax money being given away more than once but never deliv­ered — and I sup­pose a lot of peo­ple would feel the same. That said, I still think the blo­gos­phere is capa­ble of quite a lot. We col­lect money for soft­ware devel­op­ment, new power­books and what­not. And if some­one can raise $1300+ to help trans­port dogs from one coun­try to another after being screwed by their car­rier just by being men­tioned on The Daily Source Code (I won’t link either as this isn’t point­ing fin­gers in any way!), I hope we could raise a lot more than that for the really impor­tant prob­lems of the world. And this isn’t the usual “oh, so we can just cut any sup­port to the arts for five years as this isn’t sav­ing lives anyway”-discussion. That’s not what it is about. If that was true, I shouldn’t be writ­ing this on an expen­sive lap­top sit­ting in my comfy chair. But if dog lovers can sell their story to peo­ple who care about dogs, peo­ple lovers should be able to sell the story about star­va­tion in Africa to peo­ple who care about…people.