Switching on the news this morning to discover that the death toll following the Haitian earthquake is 200,000 and rising, should make us thankful for how easy we have life.
But the weather report that followed, in which the presenter’s opening lines were “if we can deal with what has been thrown at us over the last two weeks, we can deal with anything,” made it embarrassing to be British.
Is a smattering of snow and a shortage of salt really the ingredients of a national crisis? The icy roads gave some people a valid excuse to take a day off work, with a lucky few even being paid for the privilege. And those Haitian’s think they’ve got it tough.
But it was a photograph on page three of Friday’s Metro that made me thankful to have ditched the notebook and left the world of journalism behind.
Showing piles of corpses outside a mortuary, the picture carried the caption “families and rescuers brought the bodies there in the pathetic hope of some sort of dignity and a burial.”
Exactly what sort of “dignity” is it to have the lasting image of your life, a corpse, splashed across a newspaper thousands of miles from home? This is the typical sensationalist tripe, which encapsulates the morbid curiosity of a nation hungry for bad news.
This kind of disaster forces us put our lives into perspective. We sit worrying about getting a better job, meeting the perfect man (or woman) and generating enough cash flow to afford a nice little semi, two cars and organic milk.
Most of us have never gone hungry, have a roof over our heads, free healthcare and are safe in the knowledge that the Government will pay out should we lose our jobs. On the whole we’re a consumerist nation, which needs more and more cash only to satiate our materialism.
Yes it’s arguable that it’s all relative, but isn’t it about time that we sat back and were thankful for how easy we have it, stopped complaining about the weather and got on with living?
