once again.
currently listening to: Nothing [*sighs*]

the power of the media impresses me.

duh.

images, words, sound: that's enough to dominate our senses and manipulate our emotions. add celebrity appeal and human interest, and that's capable of influencing our entire lives with some being less conscious of it.

really, i really used to wonder what good it is to stay in front of the TV all day to watch images of dying people and witness an escalating death toll every day. would it make the death toll fall? would it make anyone feel better? would it lessen the scale of destruction that has occurred? i used to think that, i know, and that's it- i feel sad, but i don't have to be constantly reminded of it, or let my emotions be dominated by the tragic scenes that are on-air each day.

and that was before i realised its a common suffering. everyone wants to be part of it, to feel the pain, the cry the tears, to bear a heavy heart even though it's way over at another continent. because we feel, that's why we want to see and we want to listen. not necessarily that we want to be sad for the sake of it (which is sometimes true), but because we know there is great sadness somewhere, so we can't possibly turn away from it.

it's human.

and then i also realised that it's a desperate call for help. the scenes that repeat themselves everyday are not just to highlight the plight of the victims, but also to spark off a sense of urgency and strike the hearts of everyone out there who can make a difference. i used to question the neccessity of taking pictures of the dead, relating stories of the survivors, recounting the lives of those who have passed on. i cynically regarded it as a attempt to trigger ratings and boost sales, which seemed totally unethical, yet it is those very images that touch the hearts of people and encourage action.

we can't save the dead, but their deaths are helping those who live.
... at least in the material sense.

compare this to myanmar, where the death toll is much higher. really, with the restrictions on aid, i think the world wouldn't be giving as much attention to the disaster if the media haven't been giving that much coverage to it. people have to be reminded, like how they dramatise and repeat over and over again scenes of the sichuan tragedy. right now the coverage of myanmar pales in comparison to that of sichuan, and how good is that when sometimes it's not just about the quantity, but also the quality of the coverage?

you hear that somone has just lost 5 family members, and you feel sorry for him. but when you see a tough man like him break down, when you hear him say, "我的家没有了.", when you see him being surrounded by rubble and you know he has yet to recover their bodies... when you see a man buried under the rubble, relentlessly hanging on for rescue yet because he knows his wife and his unborn child are waiting for him, yet he breathes his last the moment they get him out of the debris... when you see an army man hiding his grief about his dead family, and he insists that he has to go on with the rescue because there are alot more people waiting for their family... when you see a mother shielding her baby in her arms as she is crushed by the debris, and with her cellphone she typed her last message to her baby saying that "if you live, please remember that i love you."

totally. i went overboard and typed too much.
but you'd feel more than just 'sorry' for these people.

moving on, there are alot of factors at work for the difference in actual aid rendered to sichuan and myanmar.

the government.
the race.
the media.

other than the media, i really think the race factor is a really influential factor. somehow, it seems that the chinese feel especially more when they see their people in plight. yet i still firmly believe that empathy reaches beyond racial boundaries; when you see those images you'd feel obliged to do something regardless of your background. sure, it does impede action or the extent of aid rendered, but few can be immuned to the immense sadness that plagues the disaster areas.

my mother goes on about how our muti-racial makeup makes it impossible for the local media or government (synonymous lah) to organise any large-scale program to raise funds for a disaster in china- what, so aid comes with racial distinctions? because i'm chinese, so you don't want to help me even when i'm dying right in front of your eyes? so i cannot be entitled to the maximum amount of aid that could have been rendered?

you gotta be really cold-blooded and totally narrow-minded to think that way.

and sometimes we get numbed by numbers. i read this comment somewhere complaining about the amount of attention given to sichuan where "only a few hundred thousand people died" among the 1.3 billion people china has. honestly, i used to think little of the numbers too. but when they started mutiplying themselves with each daily headline that i read, when the images keep getting worse and worse with each primetime news, it finally struck me that it doesn't matter how many people died. it can be just 5 people but the pain suffered is just as excruciating- imagine it being repeatedly experienced for 'a few hundred thousand' times. it doesn't make sense to only feel the pain when the death toll hits the million mark.

seriously, the aid given is so temporal in the greater scheme of things. the money, the food, the medicine, everything. the time will come when rescue teams leave, and the rest will be up to that country and the survivors themselves to handle. this includes the psychological damage. it's like your friends leaving you for a journey that only you can make when it's really not your fault that you have to start on the journey in the first place.

Premier, Wen JiaBao when he visited the survivors:
"你们幸存活了下来。。。就好好活下去。"

... and that's the hardest thing to do.

記憶は明日のために強さになるものだよ。きっと。