Provocative News

Of course, even our most professional news sources report—or at least select—their stories from a particular perspective. US news reflects US interests; Japanese news reflects Japanese interests—no surprise there. I tend to read US news online, but just peeked at headlines from the China Daily and the Xinhua News, as well as Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The Times of India, and The Japan News by Yomiuri Shimbun. It wasn’t surprising to see that local concerns dominated the “top news” everywhere, even though each paper had maybe one international story mixed in with the homegrown ones—stories ranging from Saudia Arabia’s SARS-like virus, something about Nigeria’s Boko Harma, coverage of the UK’s relationship with the EU, and a story about Russian missiles sent to support Assad in Syria.

But I admit I was surprised by what I found related to China: While all of the top ten stories for the China Daily had something directly to do with China—even if reporting on Syria, the US or the Philippines, the state run Xinhua News Agency featured more international stories in its “top stories” than I found anywhere else—it even had a photo story about Koreans celebrating Buddha’s 2,557^th birthday. Mind you, neither the China Daily nor the Xinhua News Agency said a peep about stepped-up state control of micro-blogging, a news item that appeared in other papers today. 

Xinhua Agency News - first page - 2013-5-16

 I’m not sure what headlines readers in China, Russia or Germany or anywhere might find most provocative or most compelling—but I suspect that, even as we gravitate to our local stories, we might read “universal” themes into even the most local ones (however accurately reported they are or not). For me, some of those “big” themes shot out of last weekend’s NYT. Even as I skimmed this week’s news, I couldn’t get last week’s top stories out of my head, news both harrowing and uplifting, sometimes both at once.

There was the sobering reminder that we ignore rising CO₂ levels at our peril. Taken by itself, the record breaking statistics are beyond depressing, but coupled with stories about resilience, stories of survival and human ingenuity, I’m reminded that human beings have overcome the odds in both small and big ways before.

Who knew it was possible—what did the Bangladesh woman Reshma tell herself over and over to keep herself going as she witnessed co-workers dying all around her in the collapse of Rana Plaza? What was she thinking as she heard rescue workers scrabbling above her, apparently deaf to her calls? And then? She was trapped for seventeen days—and she was in good enough shape to walk? Utterly amazing. 

And the Cleveland miracle—what enabled Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight to survive, day after day, week after long week, for years, while held in bondage and abused? Or other survivors of abduction—Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard, among them?

These miracles of sorts, of course, occurred in the wake of harrowing, horrible, heinous events. Our Western ostrich-stance toward the thickening layer of CO₂ around the planet is beyond perilous. Lamentable is Bangladesh’s lax enforcement of building codes in the garment industry and previous resistance to holding Mohammad Sohel Rana accountable. There have been over and over missed opportunities to catch criminal sexual offenders, to prevent civic disasters, to turn around global ones. Why do we wait so long? Can we minimize some of these tragedies if we pay more attention? Can we act more swiftly on our record-breaking CO₂ ?  With these questions I find myself contemplating two more about last week’s stories. . .

Who are these perpetrators? How could a bus driver, the villain in the Cleveland sexual abduction story, be a kindly neighbor and brother and son one minute, and a monster the next? Was Ariel Castro simply crazy? Was there something seriously amiss in his biochemistry? Imagine, if I were his mother or sister, what would I do? Would I, like his brother, just wish that he “rots in jail”? For me, this story triggers all those unresolved questions about the nature of “evil” and the possibility of forgiveness. On a grander scale, whatever made former Guatemalan leader Efrain Rios Mont, just this week found guilty in a Guatemalan court, capable of committing genocide and such crimes against humanity? Truly, there are things I cannot wrap my head around. There are things I really just don’t understand.

Who are these survivors?!  But if our human population includes the likes of Ariel Castro and Efrain Rios Mont, think of the Reshmas, the Amandas, Ginas, and Michelles.

On a day when the NYT also reported that carbon dioxide measurements had surpassed 400 parts per million, these women give me hope. They remind me how profoundly resilient human nature is.