Earthquakes v. Terrorists

DV, the tone of this question seems a little insensitive. Like it's some kind of 'Top 10 death tolls' competition. Are you trying to get at the different human reactions to suffering in natural disasters and terrorist acts?

Actually I was thinking to myself if he towers had collapsed frm an earthquake it would have been easier to accept. The fact tat al l this was caused by a small group of people is sickening. It makes me loose faith in the good of people

Don't let it do that to you pennysong. It is harrowing, but unfortunately the norm for our brutal species. Life remains miraculous and the planet wonderous

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend anyone. Obviously there is a moral difference between natural disasters and acts of human malice.

what I was thinking about, was how do they compare as human tragedies? The WTC strike was much more immediate to all of us because everyone knows people in New York and we all saw the pictures on TV. I don't know anyone who was affected by the Gujerat earthquake, even indirectly.

whereas there will be plenty of people in Britain who do know people affected by the Gujarat earthquake. It's just too bad that the people who do will, for the most part, not have the same wealth, influence and means to get their grief expressed throughout the world as those who were bereaved in the WTC disaster.

Look, the best thing to do I think is to keep on making all the efforts we are making to help the situation in America, and stop playing these comparison games, and then when we've done that to remember whatever charitable and communal will we managed to exert so that the next time a natural or human disaster happens we can make those efforts again. The LondonIndieNYC list, for instance, could easily become a nexus for all sorts of community charity operations, with the list name a reminder of why precisely we do this in the first place.

Or to put it another way - yes I'm a bit ashamed that it's taken a tragedy happening to Western urbanites to shake me out of my idleness, charity-wise. But that isn't a moral failure: a moral failure would be to slump back into that idleness when all this is over.