It is a cliche to say* that a disaster brings out the best and the worst in people, but it is true. One of the things that disaster brings out is the ability to spontaneously help others, including those whom one has never met and will never meet again. <\/p>\n
This fact gets some people’s hopes up. If people can spontaneously come together and help one another in difficult times, why can’t they do so in normal times?
\n
\nIf some of us start being spontaneously helpful all the time, others will start to cheat. People will spontaneously distribute food to those stranded in flooded areas, precisely because it is an exceptional situation and the people stuck there will not ask for it as a matter of right. If they start doing it regularly, the recipients will <\/i> start expecting it as a matter of right. Once the crisis has passed, the givers will not feel the same urgency, and they will start seeing what is in it for themselves.<\/p>\n
That then, is the answer to those who want to conflate different “crises”. There are crises which require immediate action – like floods and earthquakes. There are also other nagging problems, like poverty and hunger, which kill more people than floods and earthquakes. So someone keeps getting the bright idea – why not call<\/i> the latter set of problems “crises”? If only we could pull off the change in terminology, we can get the same response can’t we? Sorry, but the human mind does not work that way.
\n* It is also a cliche to say “It is a cliche to say”<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is a cliche to say* that a disaster brings out the best and the worst in people, but it is true. One of the things that disaster brings out is the ability to spontaneously help others, including those whom one has never met and will never meet again. This fact gets some people’s hopes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}