Unlike the Haitian earthquake or the Asian tsunami of 2004, when a single catastrophic event caused widespread death and damage, the situation in Pakistan has been steadily deteriorating since the flooding began last month.
Aid groups say that floods do not spark the same level of donations as other disasters, even though their impact can be severe and long-lasting.
But Elizabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said it is not just the type of natural disaster that has stifled people’s generosity.
“We note often an image deficit with regards to Pakistan among Western public opinion,” she told reporters.
Naseer Warraich, of the Association of Pakistani Canadians, said his organization has so far been able to raise only $30,000 toward it’s $1-million fundraising goal, and that he is still trying to figure out why.
“Nobody was expecting such big damage. But, from what I’m seeing, the response is slow compared to Haiti and other disasters,” he said.
He believes the media is partly to blame for failing to adequately cover the impact of the floods. After the Haitian earthquake, correspondents from almost every news outlet were dispatched to the island, and Canadian broadcasters worked together to air a fundraising telecast.
And he wondered if the reaction to the floods has been impacted by the fact that Pakistan is a Muslim country.As La Rochefoucauld famously and cynically observed: "We always find the strength to bear the misfortunes of others."
When they are really other—far away, a different colour, a different culture, a different religion currently out of fashion with us—we acquire the strength of superheroes.
It's even worse when we live in comfort and security, rather like the Middle Ages' vision of the saved: They would sit on the ramparts of Heaven, and one of their greatest joys would be to contemplate, eternally, the eternal suffering of the damned in Hell.
Many of us in North America and Europe know that feeling. Awful things are happening somewhere else, and all we ever hear about somewhere else is awful things: train wrecks, buses toppling into canyons, Afghan couples being stoned to death for "adultery."
When we taught in China in 1983, my wife noticed that on the TV news all the bad news came from outside. Inside the People's Republic, it was all bumper harvests and new dams and successful students. The message was obvious: Be glad you're living in China, because bad things happen everywhere else.
For too many of us in the West, the message is the same: Bad things happen to other people who are not much like us. Yes, we have our domestic horrors, and they're entertaining too: dads who murder their families, ex-employees who murder their former colleagues, celebrities who say rude things or sleep with too many people.
But the key word is entertainment. Justin Bieber, Chelsea Clinton's wedding, the war in Afghanistan—they're all part of an enormous soap opera, delivered in various media not to inform us but to stupefy us.
It's not our house that's in danger of being washed away, or our kids dying of something as banal as watery diarrhea or a mosquito bite. It's somebody else with those problems, problems that in our own families would leave us paralyzed with horror.
But they're brown, or black, or Muslim, or Honduran. They're not like us, so their sorrows have value only as entertainment.
And if they're not entertaining (who really cares about Pakistanis or Hondurans?), ignore them. They have an image deficit.
