I believe that most of us would rather be regarded on our own merits. My neighbors may be members of the Ku Klux Klan for all I know. They might be selling children into sexual slavery. I have no idea. But I sincerely hope that if our neighborhood were to be hit by a tornado, people would not refuse to help me just because someone I live near is loathsome.

I don’t care whether or not you donate. You have your reasons and I respect (and appreciate) your views.

I donated because I am overwhelmingly grateful to have been spared the nightmare that Southeast Asia is experiencing. I donated because my life is profoundly blessed — and the Big Mac I skip could buy something as simple as clean drinking water for a child who has lost everyone and everything that exemplifies safety and normalcy to her. I donated because I am flawed and humble and selfish and I realize that I am lucky to live in a country where we can afford to give. I donated because I can relate to human suffering without regard to politics or borders or histories or rhetoric.

And, I donated because I need to believe that if I were experiencing something even remotely as horrifying and life changing, someone would cut through the bullshit of this world and help me.

“I would rather make mistakes in kindness and compassion than work miracles in unkindness and hardness.” ~ Mother Teresa
“Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.” ~ Albert Schweitzer

Are your feelings about them being hostile toward us *enough* to withhold aid to those in need?

It seems to me to be a cycle. Their hostility begets your hostility which perpetuates and confirms the reasons why they might be hostile to us in the first place. Make sense?

*hugs*
Holly

How many of us sit around and bitch about how fucked up our government is? How many of us despise how things are run here in America. Consider that all they have to go on when forming opinions about us is what they’ve seen of OUR government..and what the news media reports.

And it’s like that everywhere.

Remember on 9/11 when our news media broadcast Palastinians dancing in the streets? Is that all of Palestine? Is that all of their view? No. It’s not.

We can see the propaganda that we’ve been fed or we can think outside the box and discover that maybe there is more to Thailand and the surrounding areas than we’ve been told.

Visit there one day. See how you feel about it then.

I’m not trying to talk you into donating, but at least consider that it may be very different than what you’ve seen from media and such.

Maybe we will regret our generosity but I don’t think that all those people were (are) hate mongers. That’s too simple.

I’ll have to get back to this since there’s more thoughts swimming in my head about these articles (but I have no time to really *discuss*).

Now, that said, I think a true cataclysm like this one is a special case, where the victims feel that *anyone* would have needed the help of others.

I won’t donate.

Not for political reasons.

But the government took care of it for me.

350,000,000 times.

If by “our nature” you mean “human nature,” then yes. And people everywhere would, not just Americans. It’s certainly not like all the generous people of the world are gathered between a certain set of artificial borders.

I swear, we’re becoming defined more by our nationality then by our humanity all the time.

How often does our government take a stance of which you don’t approve? Does your government define you? Sometimes it does. Propaganda has a lot of Americans thinking that we’re forming educated opinions when really, we don’t know shit.

These people are uninformed. They think they know what America is all about, but they don’t. And maybe they do hate us. If so, they’d hate us less if they really understood.

And I imagine that if you or I were living in that area, born and raised there, we’d be full of wrong opinions and hatred towards America too.

I invite any person reading this to tell me now that there has never been a time in your life that you felt hostility toward something that, on closer examination, you realized you’d misinterpreted entirely. I don’t think that these people should be punished for hatred born of misunderstanding. That’s just being human.

I’m not talking about what we as Americans should be doing, I’m talking about we as PEOPLE. This supercedes artificial borders and political squabbling. People are watching their children die of disease and starvation over there. Children are wandering around homeless, wondering what to do now that their parents, siblings, and friends are dead and dying. If the $50 I gave can provide a bowl of hot soup for a child who has nothing left in the world but an empty belly, I couldn’t give a shit about what his dead parents political views were.

I don’t particularly care if they don’t like us. I don’t particularly care if this won’t make them like us any more. And no, I don’t believe that this will make the world like us more. Hatred is too deeply entrenched for even a generous humanitarian effort to really overcome. They’ll assume we have political reasons for it, and guess what? We do. When some UN jackass insinuated that the west wasn’t giving enough, we all got in a pissing match. I don’t think this will really effect world opinion. But once again, I don’t care. I care about easing the suffering of people who could have been us if we’d been born over there. Hatred and all.

Also, you can’t judge an entire country based on a few people. I’m sure a lot of them are just simple people who couldn’t care less about politics. Even if everyone there really does hate America and/or Bush, why should they suffer for it? There are plenty of people in this country who hate Bush too. And what they know of America is only what their media tells them, just like what we know of them is what our media tells us.

Bottom line, I think it’s good that America helps them. Whether individual people help is up to them. I didn’t donate money to any other disaster ever, so I’m not going to donate money now. But I certainly wouldn’t exclude them because of who they are. If someone I hated was suffering, I wouldn’t say, “serves you right”.

Because if we didn’t, really, nobody else would.

And yet, deaths in Africa (Congo, Sudan) go unremarked and unaided. 2.5 million people have died in the last 2 years in Congo, alone. The World press decides who’s worthy of help, it seems.

Who controls your sympathy?

Yarha, Drop in the Bucket