Giving

I found this article comforting, in a way. I sometimes feel so guilty about how fortunate and selfish I am, especially when disasters strike, such as the earthquake in China and cyclone in Myanmar. Or when I open my inbox. Yes, I voluntarily signed up to receive e-mail news and donation solicitations from Save Darfur, Human Rights Campaign, Global Exchange, Susan G. Komen, etc. I signed up because I supposedly care, but it's pathetic how often I ignore those pleas for money that I know would be well spent. I am very impressed that Peter Singer gives over a third of his income to charity, whether his annual income is $4K or $4million. The numbers in the news lately have been staggering. Tens of thousands dead in each disaster, and I would guess exponentially more whose lives have been tragically, unimaginably altered. People have been comparing the Chinese government's response to the current disaster to that of the 1976 earthquake where about 240,000 people died. Reading about this reminded me of something I read in "When the Rivers Run Dry" by Fred Pearce. He wrote about an event that occurred in 1938 during the Sino-Japanese War. In an attempt to stop the invading Japanese army with a wall of water, Chinese troops inserted explosives into the Huayuankou dike on the Yellow River and blew it up. The death toll from this foolish act of war: 890,000, nearly all of them Chinese. Pearce saw a photo of the river valley taken in July 1938 and said the only other photo he had ever seen with such devastation was of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. I'm really poor at history, but I find it troubling that although we're taught about very important historical events such as the Holocaust and Hiroshima, there are many events of equivalent magnitude that aren't covered in great depth or even mentioned at all.