As I navigated the array of 24/7 cable news networks in the days immediately
following the tsunami, I expected to find some way to enable myself to see the disaster in its full spectrum. Some insight into the vastness of this event. Some grandiose understanding of the human condition that only a disaster of this magnitude could hope to teach.
As I scrambled around through the different television channels I began to weigh the options by which I would come to this understanding. I tried to decide on which wind-blown journalist I could rely for an exercise of this importance. They all looked the same to me. They had unbuttoned collars and lacked the usual professional appearance that I’d become accustomed to seeing in field reporters. They wore little make up and delivered their concise reports in bad lighting and often with a chaotic background.
Although the weather behind them looked brilliant and reflected the paradise locale they were said to be in, we all knew better. The stories they gave were all very similar. They talked of bodies washing ashore and getting caught on the barbed wire fences that lined the beaches in Indonesia. They talked of the stench of entire towns of corpses in Sri Lanka. They mentioned about the international aid efforts being carried out in a multitude of different towns that I can not remember how to spell or to pronounce.
However, the mass of human misery that was being flooded my way with very little commercial interruption was not affecting my view of the human condition as I thought it would. It’s not that I found myself unmoved by the conditions being related back to me by men with unusually tousled hair-for who among us cannot feel sympathy in the most general sense regarding a mass tragedy-but rather I didn’t feel I was being taught anything new by the reactions and stories from the scene of the tsunami.
Maybe I was going about this in the wrong way. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to learn anything from this event. Maybe it wasn’t the job of the media to teach me anything about tragedies, but merely to inform me of them. Or use them to fill air time. Or maybe it was their job after all, and I was simply watching the wrong channel.
I forgot on what channel it aired, I had flipped through so many that I lost count. But I saw a man being interviewed. He was an Indonesian man, much shorter and stockier than the American reporter who stood next to him and asked him questions. I listened as the interpreter relayed the questions to the man, let’s call him Phil, for I cannot remember his name or even if the reporter gave his name. I then listened as Phil, in a calm monotone voice, answered the questions while not taking his eyes off the microphone and then patiently waited as the interpreter relayed his story via voiceover back to the audience.
Phil was dressed in high-water khaki pants and a button-up shirt that was torn and tattered, presumably from his encounters with the maddening waters of the disaster. The reporter relayed his story while shots of Phil staring at the microphone intently burned into my memory.
Phil was a fireman in his local village. A neighboring town had been hit first by the horrific waves and he had been called to travel with other emergency personnel to offer assistance and aid those who had been hurt or killed. While Phil was gone, his own village, including his wife and six children, were struck by the tsunami. Most of the villagers, including Phil’s entire family perished under the waves. Phil returned hours later to find everything he had, including loved ones, washed out to sea.
The tall reporter, whose blue shirt pronounced Phil’s appearance as uncouth, went on to ask many stupid questions that attempt to straddle the line between genuine curiosity and horrific taste. He asked Phil how he felt: Numb. He asked what Phil was planning on doing now: He didn’t know. He asked him if he had anything left, either family or possessions: He didn’t. All answered in a succinct voice with his dark eyes focusing solely on the microphone. Though he spoke in Bahasa, a language I do not recall even knowing existed prior to that day, I understood every word of his answers before the voice-over interpreted his words.
Phil’s simple, but horrific story had managed to do something that a morning full of news reports replete with statistical analysis, GPS mappings of lost life, and countless reports about mass graves and leveled towns had failed to show me. It made me see the individual involved in tragedy. 140,000 is quite a big number. Then it grew to around 212,000. A couple of days later, I remember seeing a report putting the estimate near 300,000. But numbers did not show me what Phil’s staring at that microphone had.
When the numbers get mentioned, they say the word “fatalities” after the numeral. That is easier to take, because a fatality is not a person, it is a word. Around 300,000 Phils died that day. And they left millions of more Phils stranded behind, arrayed with the stench of death and overwhelming loss.
Wes Cronkite
Wes Cronkite
As I navigated the array of 24/7 cable news networks in the days immediately
following the tsunami, I expected to find some way to enable myself to see the disaster in its full spectrum. Some insight into the vastness of this event. Some grandiose understanding of the human condition that only a disaster of this magnitude could hope to teach.
As I scrambled around through the different television channels I began to weigh the options by which I would come to this understanding. I tried to decide on which wind-blown journalist I could rely for an exercise of this importance. They all looked the same to me. They had unbuttoned collars and lacked the usual professional appearance that I’d become accustomed to seeing in field reporters. They wore little make up and delivered their concise reports in bad lighting and often with a chaotic background.
Although the weather behind them looked brilliant and reflected the paradise locale they were said to be in, we all knew better. The stories they gave were all very similar. They talked of bodies washing ashore and getting caught on the barbed wire fences that lined the beaches in Indonesia. They talked of the stench of entire towns of corpses in Sri Lanka. They mentioned about the international aid efforts being carried out in a multitude of different towns that I can not remember how to spell or to pronounce.
However, the mass of human misery that was being flooded my way with very little commercial interruption was not affecting my view of the human condition as I thought it would. It’s not that I found myself unmoved by the conditions being related back to me by men with unusually tousled hair-for who among us cannot feel sympathy in the most general sense regarding a mass tragedy-but rather I didn’t feel I was being taught anything new by the reactions and stories from the scene of the tsunami.
Maybe I was going about this in the wrong way. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to learn anything from this event. Maybe it wasn’t the job of the media to teach me anything about tragedies, but merely to inform me of them. Or use them to fill air time. Or maybe it was their job after all, and I was simply watching the wrong channel.
I forgot on what channel it aired, I had flipped through so many that I lost count. But I saw a man being interviewed. He was an Indonesian man, much shorter and stockier than the American reporter who stood next to him and asked him questions. I listened as the interpreter relayed the questions to the man, let’s call him Phil, for I cannot remember his name or even if the reporter gave his name. I then listened as Phil, in a calm monotone voice, answered the questions while not taking his eyes off the microphone and then patiently waited as the interpreter relayed his story via voiceover back to the audience.
Phil was dressed in high-water khaki pants and a button-up shirt that was torn and tattered, presumably from his encounters with the maddening waters of the disaster. The reporter relayed his story while shots of Phil staring at the microphone intently burned into my memory.
Phil was a fireman in his local village. A neighboring town had been hit first by the horrific waves and he had been called to travel with other emergency personnel to offer assistance and aid those who had been hurt or killed. While Phil was gone, his own village, including his wife and six children, were struck by the tsunami. Most of the villagers, including Phil’s entire family perished under the waves. Phil returned hours later to find everything he had, including loved ones, washed out to sea.
The tall reporter, whose blue shirt pronounced Phil’s appearance as uncouth, went on to ask many stupid questions that attempt to straddle the line between genuine curiosity and horrific taste. He asked Phil how he felt: Numb. He asked what Phil was planning on doing now: He didn’t know. He asked him if he had anything left, either family or possessions: He didn’t. All answered in a succinct voice with his dark eyes focusing solely on the microphone. Though he spoke in Bahasa, a language I do not recall even knowing existed prior to that day, I understood every word of his answers before the voice-over interpreted his words.
Phil’s simple, but horrific story had managed to do something that a morning full of news reports replete with statistical analysis, GPS mappings of lost life, and countless reports about mass graves and leveled towns had failed to show me. It made me see the individual involved in tragedy. 140,000 is quite a big number. Then it grew to around 212,000. A couple of days later, I remember seeing a report putting the estimate near 300,000. But numbers did not show me what Phil’s staring at that microphone had.
When the numbers get mentioned, they say the word “fatalities” after the numeral. That is easier to take, because a fatality is not a person, it is a word. Around 300,000 Phils died that day. And they left millions of more Phils stranded behind, arrayed with the stench of death and overwhelming loss.