It has hardly been a week and a half into the western new year, and yet, I think the Chinese year of the Tiger already has to deal with even more disasters dropped by the fleeing year of the Ox.
As if 2009 wasn't bad enough.
A week or so before, the South African Tongo football team were attacked with a hail of gunfire - killing two men and compromising South Africa's hard-won bid to host the FIFA World Cup later this year.
Yesterday, a massive earthquake hit the small Caribbean nation of Haiti - and has left uncountable people dead.
Today, an entire section of sea froze in China - as more families and people suffer from the cold snap that has been blighting the country since November.
Yet, as we flip through our newspapers and get on with our day, we never seem to register that all these stories are real, and not just ink printed on gray sheet, adorned with photos that don't register in your mind. With the Advent of the Internet, we become even less concerned with the goings-on of the world, even though the World Wide Web has increased the pace globalisation has started in connecting people. In a way, I really do think we have become more isolated and ignorant with the offering of information with the click of a button, the entire database of millions of individuals with a few mouse clicks. Instead of broadening our horizons, we narrow them, searching for our interests and only our interests.
Across the globe, right now, while I sit at my laptop under my comfortably whirring fan, the people of Haiti mourn their dead and the wreckage that is left of their country, and the rest of my world goes on with it's own concerns, like registering for my Junior Collage and wondering if I will be able to get into the Outdoor Adventure Club.
My mind tells me to leave this be, to think for myself and not to waste time mourning the troubles of people far away and strange, to get on with my life and to leave these thoughts to rot.
But I know that in the end, the troubles of those strangers on the other side of my planet are also my troubles, and their sorrow should also be my sorrow.
If we are a global village, why are we not just people?
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