Neon Nation

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“Traditional Maasai lifestyle centres around their cattle which constitute their primary source of food. The measure of a man’s wealth is in terms of cattle and children. A herd of 50 cattle is respectable, and the more children the better. A man who has plenty of one but not the other is considered to be poor.[37] A Maasai religious belief relates that God gave them all the cattle on earth, leading to the belief that rustling cattle from other tribes is a matter of taking back what is rightfully theirs, a practice that has become much less common.[38]”

Shit, down here in Brazil we not only offered to send tracking units and doctors to help in 9/11 but we wanted to send a whole lot of donations to help with Katrina (we have experience with floods down here so we knew what kind of medicine to send to prevent outbreaks). 

We alone had like 2 army airplanes full of medicine and non-perishables like baby formula, diapers, bottled water, mosquito nets and other stuff that’s needed to fight opportunistic diseases that hit flooded areas, enough to assist a good few thousand people at least, ready to go the day after it hit, but your government refused the donations. 

The same thing happened to the Canadians and Europeans who offered help, the US embassies around the world told us all to give money to Red Cross.

And so we did, we all gave hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and then this happened:

Red Cross scandals tarnish relief efforts

‘Breathtaking’ Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid

I didn’t know that other countries tried to help after 9/11 or Katrina. Like, that’s something we, the people, should hear about and we don’t.

Most the time, when people say “oh FEMA or something sent people right?” re: fires, its actually people from other countries showing up and kinda ignoring the government telling them to fuck off and staying on behalf of local departments because we REALLY need them. 

If there’s a huge ass disaster, and the government is sitting there with a thumb up it’s ass, help is offered and most the time– shit, it gets there! But then the feds do something really fucking dirty. They insist they were the help, if it’s talked about at all. 

They insist those people putting out fires were federal people, because to most people a fireman’s a fireman. The people handing out water and food, a relief worker is a relief worker. So on and so forth. 

We had people come up when the fires were so bad a while ago– not the Australians, but i think there was like a German group of like 3 guys that flew themselves over? They came out of sheer “this is horrible and we’re helping” and my dad [local fire chief] had them working with our guys and the feds lost no time telling every news outlet that it was THEIR people doing all the fire knockdowns and structure work when these guys were running into buildings and grabbing people, pets, and people’s important documents because they knew papers were a pain in the ass to replace. 

What you gotta understand is that our government is very intent on selling us and the rest of the world [as much as possible] the idea of a powerful and self reliant country. All our reporting on disasters, starts with the scaremongering and then moves to “but our people can handle it because we’re the best at handling things” and then they move on before the idea it’s out of control comes to mind. The average person outside of the disaster has no idea, if they have never been around such an event or met someone who regularly deals with these things, they will kinda probably nod along with that. Because we have no real scope on the scale and impact– by design. Our media intake is very controlled to slant everything to the “eh, we can handle it and everyone else out there– they need our help because they’re not so good at handling disasters like we are.” People who know better, reading international news, interacting with international social groups, looking outside their sphere of community– we know better but that kinda slant is really hard to break from because of that grip American media has on information. So, taking that knowledge, we further have restricted reporting on certain disasters because they’re considered unimportant.  Hurricanes are considered important, earthquakes are only considered important if it wrecks something the government cares about or somewhere a couple million people live that they’ll upset the national money flow/they can throw money at someone to make the news care, floods are only important if it’s in a similar manner to earthquakes but since they occur annually they’re rarely reported on nationally, mudslides that kill people or leave hundreds homeless aren’t important to the government even through they happen constantly, wildfires that consume most of the nation/continent each year generally are unimportant until they consume a town or threaten a government interest/money flow location. Terrorist attacks are always important because people will talk about them.

So, when we do get help for any of the above, it’s possible that most people may have no idea about what’s happened, let alone that help’s been sent. Or if people know something happened, the details are vague– the news don’t care to give the nitty gritty. You’ll know something happened and people are suffering and “gee, isn’t it good you’re not them” and then now the weather.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_response_to_Hurricane_Katrina