Death, destruction, and disease.

The world's most powerful earthquake in forty years struck on December 27, 2004, deep under the Indian Ocean, setting off the most devastating series of tsunami in recent memory. Walls of water dismantled homes and churches and businesses and livelihoods like tissue paper, while smothering and crushing hundreds of thousands of people. All that's left now are scenes of utter depravity and inhuman pain, like something out of a Ridley Scott movie.

Here in middle-class Southern Black suburbia, few people can say that they've lived through something so naturally heinous. Sure, every few years a hurricane or four comes through and demolishes a couple of homes, but the level of complete annihilation witnessed by the South Asian tsunami victims emerge unparalleled by modern human terms.

But we don't care, because the victims aren't white.

Now, at this point, some of you are thinking, "Dammit, can't he leave race out of this! This is a humanitarian crisis of biblical proportions happening clear across the world. Doesn't he have the simple human decency to leave race alone for once!?!"

Nope. Sorry.

I laughed openly at Spielberg's Amistad; I'm not gonna turn off my brain to soothe your pathetic Western guilt. Days ago, when the first information about the natural calamity reached the airways as the waves crashed, the first stories discussed tormented white tourists inconvenienced by the roiling waves. Images of young Hannes Bergstroem, aged eighteen months, played continuously on Live at CNN days after the event, creating massive, chaotic, wide-angled shots of devastated dark-skinned South Asians in areas like heavily Muslim Indonesia running from impending doom or strewn about the shattered infrastructure like so many colored toothpicks awaiting a cleaning order in writing and a strong broom held by some graying bent-backed Negro trustee clad in a gleaming light blue United Nations uniform. I don't give a damn about lost supermodels or dead Nordic tourists anymore than the hundreds of thousands killed and wounded for the sad happenstance of living in the wrong poor countries at the wrong time.

Our international media sought out images and stories from rich white tourists in order to provide their clients, the uninformed public, easily identifiable human victims and survivors for your viewing pleasure. As always, the unspoken inference is as follows - The only important deaths happen to white people. In order to be concerned about global hardship, white people have to be involved. The angered waters of the Boxing Day Tsunami wash clean Frantz Fanon's wretched of the earth, poor, starving, naked and subsisting; for the liberal American television viewer they are still nothing more than George Orwell's "undifferentiated brown stuff" from 1953's Marrakech, undeserved of anything more than a couple of words of insincere solace and token pennies for rebuilding from the wealthy Western white world.

And President George W. Bush didn't want to give that! Coming under severe fire for his perceived coldness to the victims of the tsunamis, Bush dispatches brother Jeb and everyone's favorite Uncle, Colin Powell , to the scene. America was willing to watch CNN and feel false empathy for the suffering people, and then change the channel to Desperate Housewives and forget all about the rising butcher's bill, but today, I read that roughly $3 billion dollars in aid have been amassed to assist the struggling region. So, I have some questions for you, dear readers.

Given the recent earthquake and tsunamis in Southeast Asia and the worldwide humanitarian response to these natural disasters, I wonder, is it possible to have a reasonable financial response from the world's wealthiest nations to such a crisis? How much money is enough money to deal with sudden death and destruction on such a massive scale?

Are you pleased with the United States' current levels of pledged aid? Do you believe that Americans can and should do more, or that the Bush Administration was pulled kicking and screaming into having to care at all about the widespread death and destruction of the past few days?

Lastly, have you given personally? Is your decadent white guilt satisfied? Did CNN Sandra Bullock your wallet open?

Your comments, as always, are appreciated.