Why does it take a major disaster to motivate us, en masse, to help our fellow man?

To be honest I kind of don’t care, but least I can say it. Not to mention I should not have to pick up after other people if you will, and when I do say something unless I have a lot of money,power,connections etc…. No one is going to listen nor will I make a REAL difference. Thats just I how I feel.

and most, not all ,people will forget faster than they remember things least now a days it seems like.

You reminded me of when Lewis Black said something along the lines if the media and politics spent as much time and energy as we do on pointless and just no real meaning we would get a lot done.

heres the video. Go to about 2:30 in the video. Sums up how I feel to a degree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNbA5GnDKRc

I think maybe because there’s no one to blame when a natural disaster strikes.

No one made life choices that resulted in an earthquake/hurricane/tsunami destroying their country, no one voted for the “wrong” person… it just happened and people are 100% victims. It’s easier to just help and not blame or pass the buck in these situations.

Great question.

I agree with @Likeradar I thnk a lot of people see it that way. I think many have little confidence that people will pull their wait or maintain a good thing if it is handed to them. Personally, I think we can do a lot more to improve the life of the less fortunate, and I think they will rise to the occasion if it is done right.

By the way, I have relatives in cancer research, and it is not the funding really. Not exactly. Sometimes they have more money than they know what to do with, but just aren’t making progress. Each researcher is looking at different possibilities, so one might be overfunded and one underfunded. Probably we need coordination and not the worry of who finds the cure first. The researchers work competitively with each other generally, not collaboratively.

1. Some of those problems can’t be solved by money.
2. Don’t underestimate how much time, money, and energy is already being invested. When the Bush administration refused to fund stem cell research, private donors got together about $1.5 billion to make it happen. I can’t find numbers for the amount of money donated to cancer research every year, but I can tell you that government funding numbrs in the billions. I personally give to the ACS every Christmas. If you’re feeling guilty because you’re not personally doing anything except in times of crisis, you can change that at any time.

The news media relentlessly beats these disasters to death with pictures and coverage. That does not happen for grass roots movements to eliminate long-stranding problems.

Also, people believe they can make a difference with a natural disaster.

It’s a great question that speaks volumes about how our society is run.

Things that appear to be a natural way of running a society are accepted. Haiti may be one of the most violent, corrupt, and impoverished countries in the world, but there are still places in the US where people are living well below what we consider a minimum standard.

We’ve let many of our once great urban places fall into complete disrepair. I could name the usual suspects like Detroit, New Orleans, Baltimore, etc, but virtually every large American city faces these kinds of problems, yet there is zero reaction to it. People should be disgusted with how parts of their country look and react to it, not simply scoff and then accept. We don’t react to these problems as if they’re emergencies, but as if they’re facts of life that can’t be cured.

This state is simply accepted. Most people certainly don’t like it, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to do anything about it. They will continue to feed the disparity and segregation that comes with our most accepted habitat arrangement: suburbia.

People fail to accept the fact that oil supplies are most certainly going to start diminishing over the next 5–20 years, yet we’re doing next to nothing about it, something that will probably shock our culture and the world more than an earthquake or hurricane ever could. There will be oil hundreds of years from now, but the rate at which we will be able to extract it from the earth is going to start diminishing at an exponential rate, exactly inverse to that at which we were previously able to extract it. Alternative energies are going to help, but there is quite simply no combination of alternative fuels that is going to allow us to continue running what we’re running at the levels we’re running it. Petroleum really is liquid gold and has been extremely undervalued. I suppose people will only really appreciate it once it’s scarce.

It isn’t just about cars. It’s about food, it’s about health. It’s about anything you can imagine. What the world could conjure up if people were reacting to this appropriately is incredible, yet so little of it is happening. We simply continue to find ways to subsidize a living arrangement we can’t afford.

We’ll help the third world when an earthquake hits it because we feel we’re stable enough to lend our wealth, as we should, yet we never analyze ourselves and what our culture is doing to itself.

@Steve_A When I look at the poor areas where I live the crime is awful, and it is moving out to the suburbs. Even if you don’t give a shit about the people, selfishly you should care for the rest of society and yourself. Poverty affects all of us.

Huge chunks of tax money go to cancer research, AIDS research and research into diseases most of us have never heard of. There are also numerous organizations; March of Dimes, Elk’s Club (and various other animal-based lodges), the American Heart association.

We’ve had some variety of ‘war on poverty’ since the sixties and various religious institutions – and some non-religious ones – do what they can to feed the poor. There is also welfare, WIC, housing assistance, social security, disability pay and numerous things I haven’t thought of.

My point isn’t that we shouldn’t try harder but that we should try smarter since despite the programs already in place and the money already spent there is still poverty, cancer, AIDS and many other problems.

@JLeslie I don’t give shit about the people per say. I have given a bum a dollar before,helped a friend, gave couple cans of food and what not, but at the end of day I still do not feel in the larger scheme or picture of things I made a dent or difference.

I am just some 19 year old trying to make my own in the world and think about my siblings. Sorry if I can not worry about everyone else you know….

and which is also stems to what I said before maybe if I had the money,power, connections etc…I could REALLY do something but most people who do, rather use it for anything good do not.

@Factotum Focusing on poverty, many of the things the government has done to improve the quality of American cities and towns and fight poverty has done nothing but the opposite. Urban renewal and gentrification became a popular term in the 1960s as city governments used imminent domain as an interface to raze city blocks and replace them with high rise skyscrapers.

The only motivation for this was to be able to cram more taxable entities onto a smaller physical footprint, while ultimately destroying the fabric that made these places livable and equitable, and fueled many of the conditions that produce the extreme of poverty in the US (sprawl, housing segregation).

Providing charity to the needy is something that should be done regardless, but many of the things the government and private organizations are doing to remedy these things are applying band-aids to them, like subsidized rent. I’m glad there are organizations there to feed people who don’t have a home, but the fact that the homeless stay homeless and concentrated in areas of economic depression is a systemic problem that no amount of charity can fix.

There still lies the problem than most of the needy can’t afford cars, which most Americans equate to democracy, and the only way to live life. Their governments can’t buy them light rail systems. Jobs aren’t available. It’s a vicious cycle that has many Americans living wealthier than ever before, and many of them poorer. We’ve functionally, economically, racially, and geographically segregated our society in such a way that the wealthy are no longer taking car of the poor.

We spend a lot of money on these systems that aren’t fixing the problem and in many cases just make it worse.

@Steve_A I was not saying you should be “giving” more, I was just talking about the big picture. I think something big needs to be well thought out, researched, and organized for something to really made a difference. I don’t expect you to do more as an individual, I was just commenting on your statement that you don’t care.

I think it’s a combination of what @Likeradar said (no one to blame) and the difference in timing. Our big, intractable problems take years to get to the crises stage, with people adapting to each small increment of change for the worse. “Eh”, they think, “I don’t like it, but it’s not the _worst thing in the world. Things could be worse!“_ We become de-sensitized… one small piece of shit at a time.

On the other hand, a natural disaster occurs out of nowhere… WHAMMO! The crisis is immediate, and – with the advent of worldwide media and a 24 hour news cycle- the need for assistance is readily apparent to everyone.

Great question, BTW!

@augustlan and all. Your answer is correct but doesn’t go far enough, I think. @Steve_A is being honest and is a good reflection of the general public. We just don’t care. We’re numb, desensitized to the suffering that we see all around us and even though we can be spurred to greatness, our attention span is fairly short. That’s, I believe, a built in self defense mechanism. If we couldn’t turn it off and tune it out, the sheer weight of the horror and bad things outside of our control would simply overwhelm us. So we can look at the mudslide engulfing a house and a fire raging out of control, and a street in chaos with bullets flying, people down and bleeding and in the next breath say, “Please pass the milk.” We care, we want to help, but where do we start? The problems are just SO huge and seemingly insurmountable. So something like 9/11 happens, or a hurricane, or an earthquake. Finally! Something solid and concrete to focus on. “Here, here’s some money. I might even be able to go there and lend a hand.” But you know what? We all have lives to get back to. And after a while we hear about it on the news and wish they’d just shut up. “Haven’t they fixed that yet?” Because in the meantime there have been the usual things going on in the world. That hasn’t stopped. So even though we managed to do a little bit for our fellow man over here, over there, and there, and there, and there….you see? It NEVER stops. We NEVER stop hearing about it. So at some point we grow numb. Because it’s just too much.

For the same reason that families get together for weddings and funerals and then say “We should do this more often.” The rest of the time, everyday life gets in the way. It takes something cataclysmic (relatively speaking) to get everybody’s attention and push all the ordinary concerns out of the way.

You say “That week’s not good for me” when you have an all-day meeting, a dentist appointment, and tickets to a game or a show. When your mother dies, you cancel all those things.

@Trillian GA!! I have nothing to add

As far as I can see, your basic premise is incorrect. There are several sites on the computer where the advertisers will send money to your favorite charity at no cost to the user. “Goodsearch.com” the one I use, has 87,000 charities registered, and they all receive donations from the site, and cash and such on a regular basis.

People may re-direct their donations to a large, media covered disaster, but they continue to donate throughout the year. Charity sites are increasing all the time, through Yahoo for Good, and take a look at the Google click to free donation list.