Meerkat madness

After a week of odd study hours, one that blurred the line between night and day, I decided to take a little vacation from work and school to reset my internal clock.\nUnable to sleep the entire day, I turned to a television standard to pass the time – the all-day marathon. I found a show on Animal Planet called, “Meerkat Manor” a documentary chronicling the lives of these small mammals and the daily struggles they face to survive in the Kalahari Desert. \nThe show is as much a soap opera as it is a documentary. The episodes often highlight family squabbles and love triangles instead of the more basic realities of life we would expect in the wild.\nThe producers of “Meerkat Manor” humanize their characters so effectively that those realities are sometimes met with shock from the viewer. In one episode, Flower, the dominant female and fearless leader of the family, is killed while defending her pups from an attacking cobra. \nDuring the commercial break, Animal Planet aired a commercial in which they urged loyal viewers to visit the “Meerkat Manor” fan Web site “In Memory of Flower,” where they could blog about the life of Flower and see a video tribute to her life. \nI wanted to laugh when I saw this absurdity, but couldn’t. I found the whole idea rather disturbing, not because people would idealize an animal that had brought them joy and revealed that the ideas of love and sacrifice can extend to the animal kingdom. That seems reasonable enough. Instead, I was disturbed by how this meerkat was eulogized to make her story a pathetic escape from the realities of our world.\nAccording to the World Health Organization, this year in the developing world, 12.2 million children under 5 years old will die, most of them from causes that could be prevented for just a few cents per child. They die largely because of world indifference, but most of all they die because they are poor. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 20,000 people die each day from hunger-related causes, meaning that 13 people will die from hunger in the time it takes you to read this column. \nThese numbers are not meant to shock you, merely to illustrate that in the time you have to mourn the death of a meerkat, there is a staggering ocean of human problems to solve – indefensible problems, when you examine the technological capabilities of our time.\nThese nations are poor, and throwing money at a problem has never been the answer. Sustainability and self-determination for these nations are essential because this world is far too big for us to play daddy all the time.\nStill, in the death of a meerkat, we can be emotionally touched without feeling responsible, an attitude we cannot afford to transfer to the human sufferings of our world.