Preventing Ignorance of Haiyan

With 25 million people in its path, more than twice the amount of people affected by Hurricane Katrina, Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest storms ever recorded on the planet, smashed into the Philippines last Friday morning. The death toll after almost a week reaches anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000, compared to the 100 or so deaths in Hurricane Sandy. The hardest hit city, Tacloban, lies in ruins as looters raid shops and prevent aid efforts. Photos of corpses lying untended throughout the streets and men running with television sets reminds us of something faintly apocalyptic. The United States has even sent the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier, along with other ships to help what is currently a weak aid effort.But does everyone know what’s going on?I am immediately reminded by an iconic image I viewed about a month ago on the New York Times, in which a montage of around 20 Turkish channels were shown, each reporting on things like celebrities, local tastes and a man that was filmed drunk on the streets of Istanbul while government protests raged on. The way media affects us as Americans is different, sure, but all humans face the same types of ignorance. What about us Exonians? I’ve went through my dorm and asking random guys if they knew what was going on in the Phillipines, and as expected, I mostly got “nah” and “no, what’s going on?” One guy jokingly said, “Is it mango harvest time again?”Now I’m not here to talk ignorance within Americans or the Exeter Bubble, as well as it exists. In fact ESSO has already started a campaign of showing videos in Agora to spread awareness, while allowing students to write cards presumably to be send to typhoon victims. Facebook has started a relief fund, and what I am here to talk about however, is the future of this situation, and situations just like these that have happened so many times before.After the tsunami–after Haiti, after New Orleans, after Sichuan–we learned there is a man-made disaster, which follows the natural one. There are avoidable deaths from disease and social breakdown, and we also know every dollar spent in preventing that is worth four dollars spent trying to rebuild it later. With Haiyan, the entire world, with all its advanced meteorologists knew this was going to happen four days in advance.If we had started to send our fleets of ships, started the aid, raising the awareness, all then, that would have been the time. Photographers stand looking to take a beautiful shot, reporters stand talking about the smell. In a week the talk about diseases will begin and they’ll start focusing on the death toll–and in another week they’ll leave when the killing starts. Reports of armed gangs roaming the streets of Tacloban have already reached the media. We shouldn’t be reporting on these things like it’s a surprise, because it really isn’t. It’s happening over, and over, and over. My only hope is that in a month, we wont go back to talking about Miley Cyrus, but about how to make sure we can prevent so many deaths from happening again. We are a great nation, one with military might and polarized wealth. But something, something in our conscious just prevents us from seeking the obvious solutions. It’s hard to watch, and hard to understand. We are progressing, and we are improving the quickness of aid efforts–but we could be doing so much more. All we need to do is rethink things, things that are so obvious, things that wont make this just another afternoon Typhoon.