Aren’t we all nationalist and patriotic when a disaster hits our door? In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, have you heard about Haiti? The hurricane hit them hard, really hard, the world’s poorest country has declared a state of emergency as 70% of the crops have been destroyed, the flood has raised fears of a resurgence of cholera, and one and one half million Haitians are at serious risk of hunger. According to the Wall Street Journal, 21,000 houses were damaged, 200,000 people were affected, and the country, which was already damaged by a terrible earthquake two years ago, is now beyond repair, in a desperate situation.
But have you heard anything in the news? Do we care? We can’t, we already have our own disaster at home, the Jersey shore, Lower Manhattan, Staten Island and other places have been heavily touched and it is certainly terrible to see all these people without home or electricity, left in the cold and the rain, but do you see what I mean? Nobody is talking about what’s going on elsewhere because tragedy has hit home and we can’t take another one, especially another one even more tragic.
And it was expected that Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Billy Joel, Steven Tyler, Sting and others would come together to benefit Sandy victims, very expected since we have this kind of telethon every time there is a natural disaster. I imagine the telethon would have benefited Haiti if Sandy had spared the US coasts and had stayed in the Caribbean, but during the hour-long event, all the songs were about New Jersey and New York. As New Jersey natives, Springsteen and Bon Jovi are incarnating the garden state… How many songs has the boss written about New Jersey anyway?
Taking care of people close to home before taking care of people further from home is a totally natural thing to do. Animals take care of their young and most of them will never take care of an unrelated individual, some evolutionists use the term kin selection for a reason: kin selection or within-family altruism, meaning that the closer the genetic relationship between two individuals, the stronger the attention, the care, the altruistic behavior. As humans, we don’t escape the rule, but isn’t it time we break this rule?
That’s why we could cringe – depending on what you do with the lyrics – when we hear Springsteen sing this song of his, ‘We take care of our own’,… who are ‘our own’? Our family? The New Jersey people? The human species? We have to decide.