Disaster Relief Charity Warns of Imminent Danger
- Author: Chris Remington
- Posted: 2024-07-01
ShelterBox is a global charity that seeks to give people safe shelter when they have been hit with natural disasters. Just last month, throughout all of April, historic rains hit South Africa and displaced more than 40,000 people. Just last week, a huge hurricane killed at least 11 people in Mexico. According to the CEO of this international charity, Sanj Srikanthan, these natural disasters are getting worse. As this pertains to America, ShelterBox isn't really a big player, though their lack of funding definitely highlights some of the issues with America's federal disaster relief response. Record wildfires and tornadoes have plagued America in 2022, and the federal government seems busier waging a proxy war with Russia.
According to Srikanthan, natural disasters are just going to get worse going forward. In the next 20 years, it has been predicted that over 200 million people will end up being displaced by record-breaking natural disasters. Is this true? Well, for a lot of critics, this is just the same story that's been told, time and again, by organizations trying to increase how much money they receive from governments in order to operate.
The Same Story on Repeat
Since the 1960s and Time Magazine's famous "ice age" prediction, publications and politicians have been preaching the end of the world. Just a little over two years ago, politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were saying that we had fewer than 12 months to heal the planet. Well, those 12 months have come and gone. Everyone's still here, more or less. Then you get something like Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," where he predicted Florida, New York and other areas of America would be completely underwater by now due to global warming. Of course, everything is still right there, relatively unchanged.
Hurricanes take the exact same path they always have, and happen during the exact same times of the year. Tornadoes take the same path and don't seem to deviate. So for every person claiming that weather's getting a lot worse, critics simply point out that this is what they always say, and things seem to be going relatively the same that they always have. Will 200 million people be displaced by natural disasters? It's impossible to tell. Though so many of these dire predictions have failed to come true, and people just keep predicting.
Private Charities Run the Show
When it comes to funding for disaster relief efforts, private charities do the bulk of the heavy lifting. While the United States government has spent in excess of $11 trillion over the past two years, very little of this money is for disaster relief. In fact, very little of this money is for anyone's relief at all. Over a trillion passed for infrastructure, only to have the government turn around and claim that they were redefining what "infrastructure" meant and that they were instead planning to invest this money in a varied array of social equity programs. Trillions of dollars for COVID relief, and no one really knows where it went. The few politicians in Congress who ask the question are immediately shut down, called a conspiracy theorist, and the public still gets no information on where the money went. America has witnessed dozens of natural disasters over the past two years, and the federal government hasn't offered much assistance at all.
Generally speaking, it's private charities that swoop in and really help people. The Red Cross, Blue Shield, the Salvation Army, and other famous charities are always busy helping people when there's a flood or a tornado. The real criticism here comes when there's a natural disaster in another nation, and America's federal government literally mobilizes its armed forces to send warships full of supplies, and they spend billions of dollars in relief efforts. Though when these same disasters happen within America's borders, no such fuss is made.
A lot of people think back to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and how President George W. Bush dropped the ball at getting people even basic aid such as clean drinking water. Though this was just the instance America's corporate media chose to hype up, in order to slander Bush. In reality, the response is the same from a slow federal government, no matter which President it is.
So, if a private charity CEO is doom-saying in order to raise more money, it does make perfect sense. They're the ones picking up the pieces when tragedy strikes. They're the ones who need deep pockets to effect change.
