Disaster Technology, Heartless Dictatorship & Garbage Media

Couple of day ago, I was watching my daily dose of world news with Charlie Gibson on ABC. They ran a small piece on a town in China, where a school building collapsed during the recent earthquake killing almost all the students in the building at the time. Since the Chinese dictatorship has been steadfastly following the 1 child programme for years, most parents lost their only kid in that building mishap. The images and the story of these disconsolate parents were really heart wrenching. With most parents not in a position to have kids again or too distraught to even think of raising another family, this village had surely lost a complete generation.

This got me revisiting my old idea of humans controlling the nature. Its hard to believe that we can build unmanned instruments that land on the moon, robots which can conduct an orchestra, cell phone service which lets you talk to anyone anytime in any corner of the world, but yet fall short in understanding this natural phenomena. Is it just unfathomable or are we not trying hard enough? How difficult would it be to predict the next earthquake or the next Tsunami? After all these events are not uncontrollable natural things like the rotation of the earth or the explosion of a star.

Technology is often driven by government policies and funding, and not always by people's necessity. For example, we can easily clone a sheep or a dog. Now, had the government and other organizations not vehemently protested, we would have had human clones walking around us by now. Stem cells would have let us grow artificial meat and completely eliminate corporate farming of animals. Sometimes I think that lack of funding and strong regulations is one reason why we don't have great disaster management technology? Unlike cellphone, aeroplanes, automobiles or entertainment this would not be a profit begetting venture for any corporation. This technology has to be completely bred and developed by a strong willed cash rich visionary government.

The magnitude of the Chinese earthquake was so huge that it was easy for the media and people to forget another major catastrophe which happened in the same part of the world - cyclone Nargis in Burma. This cyclone managed to permanently change the southern Burmese coastline and alter the lives of most families living in that neighborhood. 15000+ people lost their lives, and thousands lost their families. But the heartless military rule refuses aid from other countries and worse, maintains its visa restrictions and impedes rescue workers from entering the country. Is this ego of the ruling leaders or is it just a fear of letting the outside world an inside view of the administration's atrocities ?. Either ways, its pitiable to see that innocent lives are lost due to a governments stubbornness to stick to its guns.

Lastly, the US media sucks as usual in its coverage of the world events. After dismissing Fox as a republican mouthpiece, I used to trust only CNN for my daily dose of news. But in a country where Hillary Clinton's inability to operate a coffee machine and the American idol results are the biggest headliners, a loss of 50,000 lives is not big enough to merit 2 days of headline news coverage. Independent media is necessary to criticize the government and give a fair and balanced news. But one can only expect so much from corporate run news networks pandering to a market which thinks the world only consists of 48 contiguous states!