John C. Bersia

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Why does it take tragedy to move the world?

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | Among the global events that give one pause, those resulting from nature's unfettered fury stand alone.

No terrorist attack, no single act of war, no madman's diabolical plot - to date, anyway - have matched the power of the earthquake-tsunami combination that pummeled coastal areas across the Indian Ocean, leaving a trail of horror and tears to haunt innumerable generations.

In the misery now afflicting once-peaceful settings, human needs should come first. Unfortunately, the nations of the world have chosen to waste time quibbling over how much aid to provide, when to deliver it and which of them should step up to the plate most generously.

Eventually, the familiar contributors - including the United States - will muster the necessary help, though for some people that effort will come too late. They will have succumbed, if not to the disaster itself, then to neglect and disease.

Like the seas responding to the earthquake's explosive power, people too often react, taking their cues from crises rather than engaging in proactive measures. Thus, we witness genocides of shocking proportions more than a half-century after declaring such behavior would never revisit the planet. As the victims fall by the thousands, we offer remorse but do little to stop the perpetrators.

And we observe and reluctantly acknowledge the most widespread slavery in human history. Upwards of 30 million people languish in forced servitude across the world, with a paucity of abolitionists in sight and even fewer solutions.

And we relentlessly pursue or preserve nuclear weapons that offer a dastardly legacy - hundreds of thousands dead or injured and a world on the brink of self-destruction for decades - and the promise of unspeakable future horrors, particularly if terrorists have their way.

And, yes, we leave our peoples exposed to the ravages of nature, in this case a killer earthquake-tsunami, despite the availability of technology that could better protect them.

How many times must tragic developments remind us of our common destiny and of the necessity to work cooperatively and imaginatively?

Although we cannot defy nature, we can take steps collectively to minimize certain challenges. Most obvious in the recent earthquake-tsunami tragedy was the absence of an early-warning system in the Indian Ocean. Wouldn't it have been worth a small fraction of the billions it will cost to rebuild the devastated areas to put into place sentinels that could have predicted tsunami arrival times and at least minimized the death toll?

That such a system exists in the tsunami-prone Pacific, supported by a cluster of countries, comes as no surprise. But because every ocean can spawn a tsunami - the Caribbean, for example, has experienced dozens over the years - every coastline stands vulnerable.

That situation warrants a global tsunami warning system.

Short of a history-ending catastrophe - such as the asteroid-collision event that some scientists believe may have prompted a colossal tsunami that circled the planet billions of years ago, engulfing all but the tips of mountains - such a system would justify itself every day.

The Australian government has made a welcome initial move by offering to assist in setting up a warning system for the Indian Ocean. Countries affected by the earthquake-tsunami shape up as logical partners in that endeavor, but a global system would require the robust participation of all nations that have the means to contribute. They should waste no more time.

The world has an endless capacity to generate events that give one pause, and we likely have not yet seen the worst of them. But if we fail to take the initiative to tackle challenges that lie within our means to manage, we condemn ourselves to needless suffering and incessant reaction.

In short, we victimize ourselves.

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John C. Bersia, who won a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing for the Orlando Sentinel in 2000, is also the special assistant to the president for global perspectives and a professor at the University of Central Florida. Comment by clicking here.