Rabble.ca, Canada
Remember the heady, idealistic days of early 2005? You know, like, January 1st through to, say, the 7th or 8th? After the 366-day bloodbath that was 2004, and once the Are-the-Tourists-Okay? angle of the Tsunami story was driven into the ground — because apparently middle-aged sex tourists are still a more compelling image of Thai suffering than orphaned locals — it really seemed as though, this year, mourning brown-skinned folks as though they were real people would be en vogue.
News agencies started turning away, slowly, from the fates of small, exclusive sea-side resorts, and started talking about the indigenous human toll of the South Asian catastrophe; news that's not, it should be pointed out, without its relevance to the goings-on of American capitalism: the post-traumatic suffering of those lucky children who survived the waves raises relevant commercial questions, like how many Asian kids is Nike's Philip Knight going to have to fire as absenteeism skyrockets whilst they look for their parents' bodies? (A quick aside: Remember how nobody wanted to give up wearing Nikes despite the devastation the company wrought on South-East Asia? Seriously, though, that Tsunami was positively Shakespearean.)
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