humanitarianism

This is a make up post for the topic of humanitarianism. Before this class I had a pretty basic understanding of what humanitarianism was. But like most people I had a lot to learn about this topic. In my past I never really had an educated discussion about humanitarianism because the main topic of my studies was more on the terrorism side; so needless to say this class was interesting to me and brought new ideas and thoughts to my mind. At first I knew that humanitarianism had things to do with disaster relief and countries in time of need, but I was kind of taken back by the fact that the Red Cross actually started out by helping out both countries in a time of war by helping them with medical needs and helping to free prisoners. Another thing that I was extremely surprised about was the fact that they helped both sides of the war. I am not sure if this is just because I was naive, arrogant or just flat out oblivious but I just thought that the Red Cross was an American based and operated company that just helped us after hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, landslides and so on. But it was just mind boggling to me to find out that they helped out other countries as well.

            The next thing that I would like to talk about is the natural disaster of hurricane Katrina. Yes, we did have help from humanitarian efforts just as the Red Cross and FEMA, but I do believe that we fell short in the disaster relief. We were really not prepared at all for the effects of this disaster and it is my personal opinion that if we were more prepared for it, than more lives would have been saved. We should have done more things just as use twitter and other technologies in our response. But instead, we stuck to the old methods of disaster relief. This just doesn’t make sense to me because what good is technology if we are not going to use it when lives are on the line. This also doesn’t make sense to me because with out weather technologies we were able to predict the Hurricane days in advance. Now, wouldn’t it make sense to prepare everything we possibly could especially in a town that is below sea level? I just believe that there were so many things that the humanitarian efforts could have done so much better. They need to work on time efficiency, the common saying is that “time is money” but in this case “time is lives.” So, needless to say time efficiency is very important.

            All in all I learned so much about the humanitarian efforts in our country and even other countries around the world. There are things that I now have in my long term memory and not just my short term memory like I have for most of my other classes. I hope to see an improvement in our humanitarian efforts in the future so that we can avoid many of the mistakes that we have made.