We treat those killed in natural disasters as if they were only numbers devoid of human feelings and unworthy of our humanitarian feelings. Journalists treat them even worse, as if they were the inanimate and inhuman treasure in a hunt for news.
A recent flood in Asir ended the lives of some people and destroyed the cars of others: First of all, it was due to fate and second, it was due to people being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think when I graduated from high school more than two decades ago, it was also a time when the “Great Tuesday” flood struck the same place snuffing out many lives and destroying people’s homes.
The difference after all these years is that the media gives a colorful presentation of the horrible news while two decades ago, it was all done soberly in black and white.
The affected place is still the same and it is still unknown to those who sit comfortably at desks and blithely shift papers from one office to the other in the Ministry of Transport — just as it was two decades ago.
Today, the media races to be the first to report news of disaster in vivid color. In death, the people in those places are sought-after subjects for both stories and photographs. In life, they were ignored.
And at such moments, newspapers compete to tell their stories and report everything about them though they cared nothing when these people were alive and needed help and attention.
Between the earlier Tuesday and the more recent one, decades have passed — years of “nothing” except for ministers’ statements, one after the other. These ministers are the very ones who never bothered to visit the affected places for a simple reason: They lacked a road suitable for ministers to travel on.
Such an out-of-the-way place was for out-of-the-way people, disregarded and unconsidered and not for welcoming Their Excellencies. Two decades separate the two disasters but nothing has changed in the Ministry of Transport or on its agenda. What progress is this? What development have we seen? How much money has been allocated for both?
