The Urgent and the Important

My new friend Suhit, the tech guru of the SEAEAT bloggers, wrote a wonderful post about what the Tsunami taught him. I suggest everyone read it for themselves. But in particular, he highlighted a post by Atanu Dey, which I've excerpted below:

It is a great tragedy. So many lives needlessly wasted. So many children dead, so many more with little hope of a decent human existence. Millions homeless without proper water, food, healthcare and education. Entirely preventable because we have the technology and the resources to avoid all this suffering and death. In the end it comes down to human frailty--greed, short-sightedness, ignorance, the lust for power....

Yesterday 55,000 children died premature deaths, a few hundred million people didn’t have adequate housing, hundreds of millions were hungry. About half of all children in South Asia are malnourished. Poverty, a clear cause of malnourishment, is a also a consequence. It is a Silent Emergency.

“Every single day – 365 days a year – an attack against children occurs that is 10 times greater than the death toll from the World Trade Center,” says Jean-Pierre Habicht, professor of epidemiology and nutritional sciences at Cornell. “We know how to prevent these deaths – we have the biological knowledge and tools to stop this public health travesty, but we’re not yet doing it.” [Source]

Malaria kills in 1 year what AIDS killed in 15 years. In 15 years, if 5 million have died of AIDS, 50 million have died of malaria. [http://www.malariasite.com/malaria/WhatIsMalaria.htm]

Yet our seas, rivers and even rainfall are under siege from pollution, waste and man-made destruction…..claiming the life of one child every 15 seconds [Source]

Over five million children per year die from illnesses and other conditions caused by the environments in which they live, learn and play. Around two million children under five die every year from acute respiratory infections, the largest killer of young children. [Source]

Almost two thirds of the child deaths each year are accounted for by just five specific causes - diarrhoea, acute respiratory infections, measles, malaria and perinatal. The great majority of these deaths could now be prevented at very low cost. [Source]

So will this outpouring of sympathy and world unity disappear as soon as the images of the Tsunami disappear from our television screens? I hope not, and I hope a few of you will join us in continuing this sudden community that has arisen from the deaths of over one hundred thousand people. Does the worth of a human life disappear if you don't see it? If we look at our collective actions -- as a planetary society -- it would seem that is our belief. So let's do our best to destroy that belief.