Aloysius Posted May 25, 2008 Posted May 25, 2008 Those Chinese - butt of many a snide remark - just look at the dedication and effort put in by ordinary chinese people to bring aid and comfort to fellow citizens - amazing and inspirational!!! Contrast poor old Myanmar a country seduced by European 60's alternative culture thinking " Small is beautiful" - look at the culture of hopelessness and political aggrandisment of the Generals - not to mention the stench of self serving corruption. It's a question of culture and leadership
Skid_MacMarx Posted May 25, 2008 Posted May 25, 2008 Aloysius, this is a real tragedy.. its unbelievable that those despots never opened the borders for humanitarian aid.
Aloysius Posted May 25, 2008 Author Posted May 25, 2008 Aloysius, this is a real tragedy.. its unbelievable that those despots never opened the borders for humanitarian aid. True, true , Azure! The hopelessness you see in the few videos there are is tangible. Folks just sitting in the rain with little or no hope of relief any time soon. Contrast the earthquake response with thousands of troops and volunteers running for miles to help. Disasters of a similar scale but with vastly different responses.
BribieG Posted May 25, 2008 Posted May 25, 2008 When Expo was on here in Brisbane the Courier Mail put out a set of replica half-sized editions of the paper from various times in the last 100 years. They made fascinating reading but the thing that struck me was one edition from the 1930s where 3 pages were devoted to the political argy-bargy in building the Enoggera Reservoir. Then somewhere on about page 8 "2 Million Chinese Perish in Famine". How times change - with modern electronic communications, not to mention multiculturalism (The Mrs is half Chinese from her Mum's side, I work in Chinatown, have a Chinese dentist etc - get a couple of Chinese people and talk to them and they are the most gentle lovely people, generally) it's almost like these tragedies are happening to your own family. I also think that travel has a lot to do with it as well. Like a lot of the baby boomers when I was younger I hit the old hippy trail, lived in Turkey, Greece and Israel for a while. You get to realise that the people out there aren't just wops, chinks or dagos etc but are basically the same all over the world with cultural differences of course. We've come a fair way since I was a teenager in the UK and my grandparents used to warn me not to get lost when I went to Leeds or Bradford because they were becoming full of 'them blackies'.
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