Tsunami: Enough already

It has to be said. I'm bored with tsunami. The first few days okay, it was a spectacle but the entertainment value has definitely worn off. The veritable pornography of grief and disaster the media is indulging in is plain unhealthy. Voyeurism and mawkish sentiment masquerading as social conscience is beginning to grate.

One of the downsides of globalism is that every world wide disaster is brought in to our living rooms and we feel oblidged or rather manipulated and badgered into doing something about it whereas in the past such incidents would barely have registered as a blip on the international radar. The media plays the guilt game to the max. Barely had the tsunam hit when we were being told that America was to blame for not sounding the alert and then for not sending enough aid.

The media talks glibly about how much the government is giving. The government? That is tax payers money. The government has no money other than what it has expropriated from the producers and tax payers.

Yes the general public has been generous and have demonstrated that when it comes to reacting to situations on the ground private charity is infinitely superior and more flexible than the bureaucratic State. Perhaps this is the salutary lesson of this disaster: private charity good Foreign Aid bad.