The Reason the Tsunami is So Bad

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I have spent allot of time over the past days thinking about the Tsunami and all the moral implications of what happened. I think that it is important to separate the mud from the water and ask some questions about justice.

1) Why didn't the world community spend the money to install an early warning system in the Indian Ocean like we have in the Pacific and the Atlantic?

It is important amid all the horror and all the talk of Asia's economic explosion and growth that many people are left behind and that the world is not spending the money needed to establish an infrastructure to deal with these problems. There is no way that 150,000 people would die if a Tsunami hit the USA.

Why are people in Asia not due the same safeguards? Some of the money that is pouring into India and Sri Lanka needs to be used for safety infrastructure. If this is not done we are asking for more of these tragedies.

2) The second question is a dicier one- is Developing World Tourism just?

I sat aghast last week listening to a German tourist interviewed about the tidal wave. He said " Oh I was sitting in the massage room with a couple of girls and then the wave crashed in"

The fact is that much of Thailand's tourist infrastructure is focused on Sex tourism and cheap trips for Europeans and Americans. There is a real justice issue here when rich people go to poor nations to ' spend there money helping out'.

I think that we ought to move toward a more sustainable situation. All one has to do is go to Cancun to see what an unjust situation exists when Tourism becomes like it is in much of the world where big corporations make all the money and local people are but employees.

3) Should we as a world be making global decisions together to avoid such horrors?

The bottom line is that we as a world need to start making decisions- and many of these decisions might result in individual nations losing sovereignty. We need to make global decisions to global problems with the majority deciding what we do.