Well-meaning volunteers co offer their time. All too often brought up in city conditions that are taken for granted but which cannot be found in undeveloped hinterland, they concede defeat, unable to stomach their discomfort and the even greater pain of those they want to help. The journalist has the advantage of the excuse of merely having to observe and take notes and pictures.
The giving of charity sound as if it is cost-free, but it doesn’t quite work that way when it comes to distribution, especially if the destination is a distant one, and it has to be shared out in the most difficult and inhospitable of circumstances for both given and recipients. But collecting money for charity is not exactly easy either because people want to be sure it’s going to where it is supposed to. That’s where the credentials of the organization’s taking up responsibility count.
It is both the tragedy and the irony of our times that what constitutes untold suffering for millions from calculated violence becomes a source of adventure and converted subject of coverage for the western media. The process of bombing, explosions and flying debris, entire villages reduced to rubble mark for impressive television and press photography, but they have increasingly enabled making the human element dispensable. For the jaded media veterans who have seen it over and over again, the picture of vacant looks of people who have lost some of their family and their means of survival along with their roofs, or both, and the silence of small children to weak or hungry to cry, doesn’t provide much variation; also because women cannot be photographed most of the time.
Besides, while the agony of victims receives lip-service, it is miniscule compared to that of the threats of self-righteous powers that be and the saber-rattling of punier antagonists fighting a last stand. The focus is always on the power-brokers, seldom or never on those whose, fate, although not of their own dong, is subject to the whims and will of other who may not know or care about the devastation that is wrought by their egos.
The so-called all-encompassing self-serving ‘war on terrorism’ has moved onto other objectives of much broader and more sinister goals. Despite promises not to leave Pakistan ‘in the lurch’ any more, the Afghans and the Pakistanis that bear the burden have been forgotten. Foreign relief may create jobs and huge contracts and provide, news, but what the refugees need most cannot come from global expediency. |
