Chester’s Tips for Success

Here’s a story that was published in the Japan Times not too long ago that I wrote on a movie that debuted the Tribeca Film Festival.

With Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar and the devastating earthquake in China, Tibet, which was receiving quite a bit of media attention only a month ago, has been completely overshadowed by these startling disasters. It’s amazing how quick media turnover is. If you think you suffer from ADHD, work as a reporter, you basically get paid to function that way.

As depressing as a natural disaster is, the tragic earthquake that hit Sichuan province, forced foreign media to redirect its attention,. Only a few weeks ago, the Chinese government was juggling Tibetan protests and international condemnation as it made preparations for their Olympic debut.

The timing of the events is truly uncanny. One week you’re getting hounded by the world for mistreating a minority of your population and the next week you’re being praised for responding quickly to a crushing and unpredictable disaster.

As strange as that sounds, it seems that it’s quite common for journalists. After a while you can talk about truly devastating events with nonchalance. There’s only so many times you can hear the words “80,000 dead in earthquake” or “millions starving” before their impact slowly dies away until they become, simply words.

Sometimes it feels as if the world is moving far too quickly and there is nothing we can do to stop it. At least before the invention of the computer and the Internet, there was an expected delay with information, which was good in some cases and bad in others (especially with natural disasters).

Now that we have the Internet, everything is immediate. The moment something breaks it’s on the net. While there are obvious advantages of being connected all the time, especially in rescue and aid operations where timeliness is crucial, I find that there is a limit to how much “devastating” news people can take.

The impact of eye-jarring news, like the Myanmar Cyclone or the Tsunami not too long ago, is that they often have a very powerful initial effect. This tends to be very effective in mobilizing people to donate or provide relief assistance. I heard in Germany, after news broke out about the Tsunami that hit South Asia, people donated money in droves, something to the tune of 500 million Euros. Pretty powerful stuff.

But human beings have limits to the amount of depressing news they can take. After a while 100,000 deaths becomes nothing more than an abstraction, one that can be pulled from a mental archive at will at a dinner party or during a lunch break. But rarely do the staggering numbers hold any real meaning after the initial schlock.

Something I ask myself everyday: does the world really need to know everything that’s going on?

Lately I’ve been reading through a lot of 18, 19C literature, Tolstoy and Austen, maybe it’s just me, but life in the 19th Century sounds pretty attractive. People actually had time to think, read and get to know the people in their neighborhoods. Nowadays, most people probably interact with more people virtually than they do face to face.

We can quote stats about the recent natural disaster that hit a part of the world we have never been to, but are unable to name our five closest neighbors.

Or maybe it’s just me, I do live in one of the most media saturated cities in the world. Good Ole NYC.

Either way, the romantic in me wishes I could step into a time machine and return to a time when life was a bit simpler.

I think I could live without flushing toilets.

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