Where is rage over everyday tragedies?

My heart goes out to those who have suffered from the tsunami tragedy. However, I feel it’s time to put this incident into perspective.

Globally, billions of dollars are pouring in from all over the world to help those who are suffering. For this, I applaud. It is too bad it takes the spin doctors and international media hype to get people interested in helping their fellow man. This terrible incident has killed some 200,000 people, almost half of which are children. One-hundred-thousand children dead. That seems outrageous from a distance, doesn’t it? One-hundred-thousand innocent lives wiped clean from the planet, stripped of their lives, of their future. Never given the chance to experience life to its fullest, to fall in love, to have children of their own and watch them grow into beautiful people.

Now step back a little bit more and look at the world. Every 2.5 seconds a child dies of starvation. Every day more than 27,000 children die of starvation. From the time of the “killer wave” to the time I write this letter, 300,000 innocent children have died of starvation – a slow, horrible death. By the time you read this letter, most likely, another 300,000 children will have died.

Where is the rage over this tragedy? Where are the billions of dollars for this “killer wave” of starvation? On this planet that we all share, tragedies don’t happen only on Dec. 26 or Sept.11, they happen every single day.

So, as you open your paper and turn on the news and are bombarded with media propaganda over one small incident that happened on one particular day, think about all the other days, every other day, that thousands of poor innocent children die because it is not “newsworthy.”

Kelly A. Parks

Everett

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