Tsunami Relief Is Just a Phone Call Away
Pacific News Service, Commentary, Sandip Roy, Posted: Jan 12, 2005
Editor's Note: Americans' outpouring of support for tsunami victims could represent genuine compassion, a desire to be connected with the world, an effort to repair a damaged reputation or all of the aforementioned. But the gesture that could count most of all is a small one.
It's finally happened. With no trace of irony, I've been invited to a "tsunami happy hour" to raise money for the victims. With one in three American households donating something toward relief efforts, with the President extending the tax deduction deadline to Jan. 31, giving to the tsunami relief is the good deed of the moment.
At the trendy grocery store, handily placed coupons at the checkout counter invite me to add $2 to $5 to my grocery bill, for tsunami relief. It's surreal to see tsunami relief positioned as the latest in impulse buys, right next to single-serve dark chocolate bars and breath-freshening mints.
It's hard not to be moved by this outpouring of giving, from underpaid restaurant workers emptying their tip jars to third graders raising a couple of hundred dollars. At the same time, it's a complicated gesture of global citizenship. Is this America, worried about the drubbing it's image has taken abroad lately, seeking to reinvent the compassionate superpower? Are corporations matching employee donations as a way of burnishing the corporate image? Or is this just my cynical view of what's actually genuine empathy?
Perhaps all the goodwill is about a real need to connect ourselves with the larger world. The tsunami obviously wasn't the first devastating natural disaster. But while earthquakes in Bam or Gujarat struck vertically, reducing a city or province to rubble, did the tsunami, which stretched horizontally across continents in a dotted line of devastation, actually bring home to us how connected we are? Watching helplessly on television, are we, through our giving, trying to be part of the scene, trying to become part of the world instead of sitting on top of it?
Or are we just embarrassed that we live in a part of the world where the worst hurricane season costs at most a hundred lives, where natural disasters are more about delayed flights and long lines at the supermarket? A weekly comic strip that arrives in my inbox starts up with a plea to donate, before moving on to lighter matters. A monthly mailing from a local deejay exhorts me to support disaster relief, before moving on to January's musical calendar. The tsunami has become the thing-that-must-be-acknowledged before life as usual is resumed. It's as if we're all reaching to connect with a disaster which, sweeping as it is, is still alien to our lives and thus incomprehensible.
And yet there are connections we may never even think about.
Just a few days ago, the Star and Buc morning show on Power99-FM in Philadelphia aired what it thought was a hilarious gag where a shock jock, who goes by the name Star, decided to berate a call-center employee in India.
"You're a filthy rat-eater," Star rants. "I'm calling about my American 6-year-old white girl. How dare you outsource my call? Get off the line, bitch!" he told the hapless woman in India who went by the name of Steena. The station later apologized, less for Star's inexcusable behavior and more for putting the transcript on its Web site (it described the posting as a "big ol' mistake in judgment.")
I wonder if, like the rest of America, Star himself, or the radio station raised money for tsunami relief. I wonder if he ever thought that Steena might actually be in Chennai, the worst-hit place in India and one of the call center capitals of the country. I wonder if he ever made the connection between "rat-eater" Steena and the devastated faces on television.
Note to Star: they are the same people -- targets of our charity and of our shock jocks.
To have Sumans and Sujatas in India pretend to be Steenas from some familiar American suburb helps us maintain some semblance of control over the world. But I wonder what the Steenas of the midnight shift made of the giant wave that came crashing down on their hometown. Did it remind them that they live in Chennai, even if they know the weather in Philly?
Perhaps next time we call tech support and they make small talk about American weather, we could ask them if they are in Chennai, if their families are OK. It's the smallest way we too can reach out and be citizens of the world, instead of trying to make the world an American suburb. In some ways the gesture might count more than that five-dollar tsunami relief tacked onto our grocery bills.
PNS editor Sandip Roy is host of "UpFront," New California Media's radio show on KALW-FM 91.7 in San Francisco.
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