Bangladesh is poor. It has no oil. It has no real strategic value. So, we don't care.
Or so it seems.
A category 4 cyclone is heading directly towards Bangladesh. It's expected to make landfall around 3 am on Friday, November 16. As it approaches land, cyclone Sidr is only gaining strength. The low-lying floodplains of Bangladesh are in severe danger - hundreds of thousands of people are in the path of a catastrophic storm. This will be much worse than Katrina. Much.
Yet, we hear little. Andrew Sullivan does his best to advertise, so does Chris Mooney from The Intersection, as well as the Daily Green. But where is the MSM? Where are the nightly news? The running reports? The updates every ten minutes? Why are the satellite images not staring at us from every screen?
It makes me sick to my stomach how the world is divided into "important" and "unimportant". So 200,000 Bangladeshis die? What's it to us?
Caring about it makes us human. Not caring makes us, well… you decide.
Photograph: U.S. Navy
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