The Good News

Individual contributions do make a difference:

"[six months after the tsnami]... there has been no spike in diarrheal disease, cholera, giardiasis and dysentery. The affected areas have had no increase in malaria or dengue fever - diseases spread by mosquitoes, which breed in standing water. In many places, tsunami survivors living in camps have suffered less from waterborne diseases than countrymen in comparable areas who were not affected.

This was not a case of aid officials exaggerating the peril in a bid to increase donations. Instead, it is a story of aid done right. Governments, international organizations such as Unicef and the World Health Organization, and charities like Oxfam had a head start in India and Sri Lanka, where they have long had trained workers in place to deal with flooding from monsoons. In Aceh, a war zone all but walled off by the Indonesian government, there had been little international presence, yet there was no rise in waterborne diseases.
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The safe water campaign was so effective that there are even preliminary indications that it helped to cut down on the annual monsoon death toll this year. Relief workers are now trying to make clean water permanently available in tsunami-affected areas - some of which had no water systems or barely functioning ones before. People worldwide who gave generously to help the victims of the tsunami can be satisfied their money saved lives, and will go on saving them.

And the Bad News

A deal signed between the Sri Lankan government and rebel forces to allocate tsunami relief money has fallen through, and a friend from there says the three-year-old cease-fire agreement may be in jeopardy.

And because it's been a few months since the last time I bitched about our country's (and this administration's) lack of support for our troops:

From bases in Iraq and across the United States to the Pentagon and the military's war colleges, officers and enlisted personnel quietly raise a question for political leaders: if America is truly on a war footing, why is so little sacrifice asked of the nation at large?
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Charles Moskos, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University specializing in military sociology, said: "My terminology for it is 'patriotism lite,' and that's what we're experiencing now in both political parties. The political leaders are afraid to ask the public for any real sacrifice, which doesn't speak too highly of the citizenry."

'Patriotism lite.' Yes, that sounds about right. Fly the flag, call people who burn it dirty commies, recite the pledge of allegiance, toss a yellow ribbon on your car, and then wash your hands of the whole mess. Heaven forbid you should trouble your mind about what boys and girls are actually facing over there. Heaven forbid you should drive your SUV a few less miles a week to perhaps slightly reduce our dependency on the oil we're fighting over (oops, clearly I mean, support the liberation!) Heaven forbid you should ask the difficult questions or demand better of our representative government or inconvenience yourself in any way. No, far better simply to applaud the prez, blindly agree to whatever he says, and question the patriotism of those who do otherwise.