What’s wrong with the Japanese? I have never seen a race or a culture that stunk more at garnering sympathy than the Japanese.
We Americans love to feel sorry for people. It is an American pastime somewhere between baseball and TMZ.com. We raised millions and had telethons for the Indonesians after their tsunami. Likewise the Haitians after their earthquake. Like we even knew where Indonesia is and anything about Haiti other than voodoo.
We love to raise millions for people we have never heard of before, people we can feel sorry for. But when a modern and developed country like Japan has an enormous disaster, we worry more about whether our milk has higher radiation than your average xerox machine more than the 25,000+ dead or missing.
All you disaster prone countries should know one thing. If we can’t feel superior to you, we won’t feel sorry for you. You are on your own.
The Japanese have undergone one of the most horrific and most well documented natural disasters in modern memory. Yet…
Yet…this disaster was the most un-sympathized disaster in modern memory.
Natural disasters for the unsympathetic, along with flash mobs and dancing weddings, are now just another form of internet entertainment.
The Japanese don’t cry on TV or look doe eyed into the camera. They fix roads and get back to business. They leave no room for sympathy.
Kanye West and Fergie simply don’t do star studded thingys for those that help themselves. American sympathy is reserved fo those who ask for it, nicely.
I am not suggesting that Clooney & Co. need to get on the airwaves asap and beg for dollars. Far from it. Nor do I think that the Japanese should do the same.
But if they could just be a little more pathetic, maybe, just maybe we would care–more.
Americans only do bailouts for those little pigs who build with straw, those who build with brick can only rely on God.
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