i'm angry

and i've been this way since sunday. at first i started to think that my anger was selfish ... that my anger seemed "wrong" because this situation is so personal to me ... but i managed to touch upon this subject with a few people yesterday and they all had the same response: "I've been thinking the same thing."

my anger stems from the following question: why ... is no one ... stressing the fact that chile needs help? after haiti, facebook was BOMBARDED with ways to help. every single person had a status up on what to do. those little stupid emoticon hearts filled my screen, i read status over status about "using your happy hour money" or "using your lunch money" to make a $10 donation. you know what, it is march 2nd and i still see those stupid hearts, still get haiti relief happy hour invites, still see something, ANYTHING, about helping haiti.

now here is my disclaimer, plugged in midway through my post: i by absolutely no means think that aid should stop reaching haiti. they need it. their entire city was destroyed. they absolutely need the help. i did not hesitate to donate to them, as many people did. they have raised millions [if not billions] to help. they have a lot of money to simply start the reconstruction process, and we all know the tricky thing is going to be getting people involved in a year, or in 10 years. i know that. i pray for haiti and my heart goes out to them and i hope that somehow through this tragedy, they can finally become what they should have always been. i hope this somehow makes them stronger and puts that f*cked up government of theirs in check.

but ... that does not mean that the lack of interest or motivation to do ANYTHING for chile isn't pissing me off. i get it. we are not as underdeveloped or poor as haiti. i would say i'm sorry for that but i'm not. i'm proud of chile, for overcoming what it's had to and becoming fairly stable. but are we oozing with money? no.

and honestly, let's just forget about the whole money thing for a minute. I am fully aware that the US, and other countries, immediately offered aid to chile. I'm not really referring to large organizations/governments, but moreso, individual efforts. i mean, where is the humanitarian effort for this ... millions were still affected in some way. Lost their home, have no water, no electricity, no medicine. People still perished, got hurt, are in damaged hospitals. I don't want to sound like a baby and say why does no one care, but really ... why? CNN coverage has been reduced to a 10pt font size scroll line at the bottom of their page. Last I checked, it's been about 72 hours since and um ... the country is still pretty much the same way it was on Saturday. It seems like once that clock struck sunday, february 28th, everything went back to normal ... CNN went back to talking about dirty politicians and facebook went back to people saying FML because their nail broke.

I asked my friend if their job was collecting anything and on their home page, found the following:
"Generally ______ focuses its work in countries on the bottom third of the United Nations Human Development Index, which does not include Chile, one of the wealthiest, most developed countries in the region."

Um ... ok I suppose. I kind of feel the way I did in high school, when it came time to pick a college. Everyone was talking about that lovely HEOP program that magically pays for you to go to school and gives you money for textbooks and whatnot. There are certain criteria that need to be met in order to qualify. I met the money criteria in that my parents did not make enough to fully afford for me to go to RIT. But lo and behold, I was too "smart". What kind of shit was it that the fact that I had, I don't know, actually studied and passed my tests in school came to kick me in the ass at the end. Had I known, I would have been lazy and gone to school for free. It was really annoying because just because I had the grades didn't mean I had the money, and last I checked, tuitions were paid with check or credit card, not a GPA.

It kind of reminds me of Chile; a country that is by no means rich, but apparently isn't poor enough to merit the concern from the rest of the world. But that doesn't mean that they don't need help to get back to where they were.

sigh ... rant over, back to work.