Why I Love NPR

Did anyone else catch that amazing segment on NPR yesterday about the family in China who lost their toddler in the earthquake? I have to admit, I was out of it, I thought the big news was the cyclone in Myanmar, and lo and behold, as I was driving home from my tutoring job, I found out that I'd somehow missed the fact that there was this giant earthquake that's killed 20,000 people.

Here's the story. I literally had tears rolling down my face during the broadcast, especially when the parents found out their child had indeed died, and they both started wailing in that way that you know you would if your heart-walking-around-outside-your-body had been crushed like that. Even the translator was crying.

(And I love how, on the Today Show this morning, which I watch a couple mornings a week while on my elliptical trainer, they devoted all of about 45 seconds to the crisis, which is about one-tenth of the time they spent interviewing Angelina Jolie and gushing about the fact that she is having TWINS. That pretty much sums up the TVnews/NPR divide for you.)

You know, I'm ashamed to admit it, but when you hear numbers like "20,000 casualties" in China or Myanmar or the like, that kind of statistic is so mindboggling that it's easy to sort of dehumanize the tragedy and think subconsciously that the loss of each of those persons can't possibly mean as much to their family and friends as it would to US if that happened here in OUR country. As if the hypothetical loss of one of our children in, say, a car accident or something that we parents fear, would be any more grievous than the loss of one child among 20,000 in an earthquake. As if somehow, our children, and family, and friends, their presence and their absence mean more to us.

It's ridiculous, of course, and stories like that one put it all in perspective.

P.S. Not to mention the whole one-child policy and China's penchant for forced sterilizations; I wonder how that dynamic plays into all this ...