charity sales, charity concerts, charity classes.
we're touched, and we'd like to help. on one hand, better do something rather than never do anything. on the other, we do a little bit, feel like we've done something, and move on in our lives. the 5.12 disaster is an increasingly distant memory already. while reconstruction and suffering is still going on, there are already many other immediate and pressing concerns in the world.
it's a characteristic of human cognition that big huge calamities are going to claim our attention. chronic problems often remain just that, chronic. in US alone,where statistics are in theory more transparent and better documented, cigarettes apparently kill 440,000 per year (all statistics are subject to interpretation but a fraction of that number it's still huge). there are maybe five natural disasters that exceed that in the history of mankind, and they were all one-off rather than annual occurrences. (as a side note, man-made disasters are unlikely to evoke similar sentiments. imagine some mining company that inadvertently caused a devastating earthquake. yes, the company's going to go bust from lawsuits in any case, but the level of public sympathy for the affected will probably be different. people will likely assume that the government will somehow step in and take care of them).
yushu, for instance, is one of the relatively better-off tibetan provinces. what about the other poorer regions that have been suffering since the beginning of time? for any kind of destitution, there is essentially always something more destitute (by definition, there is only one "most destitute"). why not first help the ones who have been "in line" from a long time? of course, it doesn't work like that. fortunately, sometimes donations for particular calamities can exceed so much that funds can be redeployed to address this.
maybe, the world simply has two kinds of people. the vast majority respond to the big eye-catching ones. a minority will toil away silently, like 阿福 who is famous solely because he had died. (of course there are many in-betweens, many of us donate monthly to charities of our choice, have regular volunteer and fund-raising we do on our own).
(and how much "regular" stuff is enough? it's once again the "we don't live in a cave" problem. and if you do so much "regular" stuff already, there's probably little bandwidth for these unexpected shocks. that being said, there are probably enough people who pop up to help in the immediate aftermath of unexpected disasters)
maybe the question at hand is how to let the people who in fact want to be part of this minority, to have an easier time finding out how to do so.
