Having made that big proselytizing post yesterday, I am having a massive guilt trip today. First I want to make it clear that talking about how Man is more evil than we ever suppose God to be, so we should not wail about how cruel He seems to be..first, I want o say that was not meant to disrespct the many on here who are personally affected. Thnaks guys for not taking it the wrong way. This wasn't addressed to people who have lost loved ones. I just wanted to clarify a philosophical POV that, if anything, is addressed to people like me, who are "neutral", that is, are far away from the tragedy and will lose no-one, but sitting on the sidelines might be tempted to make an "armchair general" rant to God about how cruel this all is. I'm sure everyone at times like this goes Job and does this. I did. But that was my final opinion.
Here's the guilt trip. This hit me at a bad time. I got paid on Christmas Eve and spent the last of my extra funds on the holiday. I just made a donation to the Red Cross today, I didn't want to email so I called up the Red Cross and got the info on who to make the check out to, the address , etc.
I suppose if I thought that God was really testing me, just to see if I could give my "widow's mite" and make a true sacrifice, I should donate some or all of my U2 ticket money that I've saved. Here I am prepared to spend upwards of possibly $400 on just 2 U2 ticketd in the coming weeks, and I am ashamed to admit the amount I donated, by comparison. I want to give more, but that ticket fund cannot be touched. If I knew when the tickets were going onsale, I could dip into the fund and replenish it later in the month, but I don't. So for now, I have to keep the Fund intact. I know that when I buy those tickets, if I don't match the amount I spend on tix with a tsunami donation, I'll feel like I've sinned horribly somehow. And there's no way I'll be able to do that. I don't have a lot of money. I already depleted the Fund this summer for the care of a sick relative, and spent 3 months building it up again, working overtime. Say what you will, a U2 concert is a frivolous luxury right now compared to this crisis. But what can I do? Is anybody else out there going through the same dilemma???!?!
Then there are the headlines. I was so bitter about statements I'd heard on TV and from world leaders the first 3 days (they seem to be belatedly changing their tone now, but it's 3 damn days too late) that I got into a rant on the phone with the Red Cross guy. He sounded like a really nice guy, not like your typical drone when you finally get through to a human on the phone at these big companies, so I went into a 5-minute rant about world leaders asking Sri Lanka "where do you expect the 1 bill to come from?" (Excuse me, one out of every 5 people in my country is either dead or homeless, and you are asking me this???)and statements like I saw on the hour-long ABC special last night, right after 'Lost"..."Only Sri Lankans, in the end, will be able to help Sri Lanka." (What the !:%#*@ is that supposed to mean? That The west will move onto more important things..like *COUGH* the Iraq election..after its attention span grows weary of Aisa after 3 weeks???) We throw away, like water, 1 billion a WEEK on Iraq??? And nobody asks where Congress gets that money from??? And Merck, the drug giant, spends 10 or 15 MILLION on a TV marketing campaign for one of its expensive new drugs, Vioxx etc, and they're very public about letting us know they're giving ONLY 200,000.
Anyway, I went on and on and the guy was really nice to listen to me. But I was so upset I HAD to rant!!
IF there is a massive, Middle-Ages caliber cholera epidemic next week (and at the rate things are moving, there will be, as sure as the sun sets orange) I'd like to see how comaplacent the govts will be. We get the BBC here too, on NPR, and yesterday someone quoted a Brit commentator saying the best thing they could do was ask the West to forgive their debt..THEN added that as some of these govts were very corrupt, we had to make sure the aid money didn't vanish into Swiss Bank accounts, and we should tie aid later on to promises of good behavior.
Sorry for my rant but just wnen I want to turn the radio off, I have to listen somehow and bear witness, b/c right now, I'm ashamed to be a Westerner. At least, I'd be if I had to face an urban dweller in a city in one of the countires hit, that wasn't affected. They still have media, and can watch our response. The people are wonderful but our govt's suck. The way things are going, we seem ready to let the UN alone do the dirty work, and not contrubute directly, bypassing the UN. That would give Bush and everyone else something else to fob off on Kofi annan, and a legit excuse to get rid of him. You watch.,
Sorry folks. Thanks for putting up with my rant...I'll go now
excellent post, beli. so true. 
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