Facebook and Haiti

[noldoaran]

Someone, a girl I have never met and only friended out of a sort of duty or reluctant pity, became quite irate when I sarcastically attacked the effort to help Haiti amidst a status update whose true intentions were to sneer and complain about Facebook. Instead of polite disagreement, she called me selfish, something that, of course, called me to

Comments

[taurnufuin]

I'm of the opinion that it's thoroughly idiotic to try to throw money at foreign countries when we are incapable of so much as dealing with our own domestic issues. And I also think that many people become oblivious to the fact that suffering is inevitable in this world and that no nation or rich elite is capable of mitigating that.

I also think, though, that, in this age of world-wide communications, where it is possible for us to learn in an instant of disasters which happen halfway across the globe, many of us have forgotten the fact that, for all intents and purposes, the miseries of people half way across the globe have no bearing whatsoever upon our existences. Yes, it's horrible that this has happened to them, and, yes, what I've read of the Haitian earthquakes is terribly tragic, but it still has no immediate bearing upon us, and given the finite nature of our resources, we have neither obligation nor reason to spending money which we don't have trying to fix their tragedy

[noldoaran]

Oooph. You almost did. Haha.

But not really. Yes. We are in accord.

[kubla42]

Selfish? Not necessarily. I did read that post as insensitive like whoa, though.