Why Does Humanitarian Donor Response Value the Dead Over the Living?

"Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering," wrote Dostoevsky. His words may have responded to the common habit we humans (I include myself here) have of ignoring people when they're alive, then rushing to their funerals with bushels of flowers.

Lately, the wildly popular response to the serious Haiti earthquake disaster, juxtaposed with widespread apathy for similarly deadly long-term crises like Congo, Somalia, maternal mortality and malaria, has me wondering whether we humans value the dead more than the living. Oh yes, prepare for a dark, dark, but honest blog post.

Funerals, memorials, and death scenes are big hits in human culture, as are war stories, murder, mysteries, and game shows in which contestants endure pain for money and cheers. Realizing this absurd, undeniable truth about our majority feels only more confounding when coupled with the second sad, undeniable truth that we tend to scoff at, ignore, and sometimes laugh at dire warnings that precede said tragedies.

Long before the earthquake killed tens of thousands in Haiti, there was a running civil conflict, horrific public health crises, et cetera. Aid agencies including the UN and U.S. government offices simply could not raise enough funds to prevent so much suffering from violence, tuberculosis, and other threats in Haiti.

But once tens of thousands, perhaps as many as 200,000, were pancaked under buildings, we're all rallying to send donations and get seats at the latest speeches and documentaries. Guess what? Though it is kind to help the many survivors, remember that the dead who we failed to help before the latest disaster can't eat canned goods.

Across the globe, there are millions of people who do call for help before mass casualties, including hundreds of thousands of aid workers who have been shouting into the global bull horns for help in Congo, Sudan, Somalia, and Haiti, and for maternal and child mortality, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV.

However, donors historical, despite many attempts to update the trend, tend to categorize the "seriousness" of a crisis by the numbers dead, when it is often too late. Sadly, those who only respond with their pocket books and corporate logistics networks after mass casualties are the first to criticize those aid workers for not moving fast enough.

Surely the worst periods for Haiti were the day of the disaster -- when we wouldn't yet have been able to have moved resources in mass quantities -- and the period coming in about two or three weeks when donors begin to see the death toll taper off despite the fact that the needs of the living are beginning to rise in reaction to the growing gap in income.

Why do humans collectively ignore dire warnings of coming doom, then rally in force after people are killed and maimed? For cynics, the question leads to another, whether we value the recent dead more than the barely living?

Is it because we think the recent dead are arriving at orientation for Heaven and we're worried what they will fill out on their earth evaluation forms?

Or worse, perhaps we find it easier to respond to body counts than forewarnings because one can show compassion without obligation?

You may now throw tomatoes.

(Peter Daou makes a different, but similar case at UN Dispatch.)

Photo credit: Simminch