a much needed break

My mind is growing weary of my reading for geography, it is simply emotionally, morally, and spiritually draining. Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis details the famine of the later part of the nineteenth century in British Colonial India. I had no idea it had even happened and feel the worse for knowing it now.

It is estimated that approximately 60 million people died in the span of a few years in China, India, and Brazil, with about 30 million of them in India. People starved in the streets, women unable to feed themselves or their children tried to sell them in cities, people had to walk miles in order to reach relief camps that offered only a prolonging of death, providing only a pound of rice per day per person for which hard labor was required to earn. The camps were also plagued by disease. According to the data the average weight of male corpses was sixty pounds. People were also said to have resorted to cannibalism, eating the dead and sometimes their own children.

The saddest part of the whole ordeal is that the "famine" was not a result of an absolute lack of food, but of exportation to other countries who could pay higher prices for the produce. Tens of millions of men, women, and children were starving while the food that could have kept many of them alive was being shipped to Europe. And those who contributed money to the relief efforts were taken advantage of as well, because the money they contributed was being used not to support relief efforts but to fight an unneccesary, ill-conceived war in Afghanistan. And those offering aid within the country were in danger of being arrested. On that note the amount of food received and cleaniness in the prisons were greater than in the relief camps, driving many of the poor and starving to committing crimes in order to survive.

We can be so kind, generous, loving... and yet so cool, calculating, grotesque, cruel... I'd like to say this sort of thing would never happen in today's world, but I'd just be kidding myself. It is happening and it will happen, it will always happen.