Emergency Banana Productions

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or in the United States for the past week or two, you’ll probably have heard something about the terrible bushfires in Victoria, Australia. Basically, there’s been some big fires, as in a few thousand square kilometres of forest and a large number of country towns all over the state. If you watched the Australian Open, you’ll have seen how hot it was down Victoria way; it’s that heatwave that’s caused two hundred people to have been burned to death so far, and the fire department says that it could go to three hundred. That’s quite a few when you’ve only got twenty million people in your country — by percentage of population, it’s comparable to the thousands who die in the tsunamis in Indonesia or earthquakes in China.

I must, of course, send my condolences and apologies to these people, and I think that the fires are absolutely terrible, especially when you think that some fires (unlike earthquakes and tsunamis) were deliberately lit. The morons who did that almost deserve the death penalty — almost. I don’t think that any crime deserves that much punishment, with the possible exception of genocide — and even then only really big ones. But what bothers me, and I mean really bothers me, is how I’m not connecting with this story on an emotional level.

I can use my head and send condolences to the victims and condemnation to the morons, but I just can’t feel for them. I don’t understand why. When I see news about the fires on TV, I know that I should be feeling sad — instead I’m feeling sad that I’m not feeling sad and then feeling guilty. It’s a bloody weird emotion, and an unpleasant one.

Maybe it’s just that you just can’t see an event like this as real. If twenty people die in a fire, you think “wow, that’s a lot” but when you get to two hundred the mind can’t comprehend it. The human brain is ill-equipped to deal with numbers any greater than a hundred or so (which is one of the many reasons why economics is completely and utterly insane). Or maybe it’s just a sense of distance physical and mental. I’m a city boy, sure, but I know the bush pretty well. I love a good bushwalk. On the other hand, the real sense of belonging in a country town, where you know everyone and get on with most of them, is something that a non-resident can never really understand.  Maybe it’s this feeling that I’m missing here.

But I personally think that the problem really lies with the news. I’m in favour of TV news for delivering news about things like politics or economics, since things like that are all about facts. But when attempting to deliver an emotional story like this one, then ultimately the emotional story is sacrificed for the factual one. Aussie news has been giving wall-to-wall coverage of these fires, by which I mean it’s the ONLY story on the news. I’m not kidding. For four days, every single story on the news has been sacrificed for more fire coverage, with each channel picking out three or four new unfortunates each week to talk to, and believe me, with thousands of people homeless there’s quite a few unfortunates around. It’s beaten the previous record set by a certain accident involving three buildings and four planes, which dominated the news for three days. I just think that when you’re hearing more or less continuous coverage of a story like this, it takes away all the emotion and just turns it into a series of… well, facts. To me, the poor buggers left homeless or orphaned by fires are just numbers. Maybe that’s the problem with the news today.

Tags: God of Pie, Rants

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 7:36 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.