Editorial
As originally printed in The Boston Globe
November 4, 2005 edition

In this season of disasters, compassion fatigue could easily set in. But the Internet could turn Americans into Web-surfing philanthropists who save the world a little bit at a time with $10, $20, and $50 donations.

The tsunami and Hurricane Katrina pelted the public with how huge and how personal disasters can be. This week, PBS expanded the view with the premiere of "Rx for Survival: A Global Health Challenge," a series coproduced by WGBH and Vulcan Productions, a Seattle company. The series looks at the diseases that prey on the world. And a related campaign focuses on the health needs of children worldwide.

The facts are devastating. Every day 30,000 children under age 5 die from what are largely preventable causes. These are the chronic disasters that don't grab morning headlines but do take a wrenching toll on human lives.

Hope lies in the simple fact that aid workers know how to help. The vaccinations, vitamins, antibiotics, and medicines that Americans take for granted can have a miraculous impact in poor and developing countries, helping protect children against pneumonia, malaria, neonatal tetanus, and AIDS.

But saving lives takes money.

The risk is that "Rx for Survival" will exhaust people, that they'll turn away thinking: I gave for the tsunami, or the flood, or at the office. The opportunity is to ask people to face the onslaught of bad news with the confidence that much of it can be beat.

In the same way that people check blogs and shopping sites, they could check websites that monitor the world's problems. One could buy a bestselling book or CD for about $15, or one could see what Save the Children, UNICEF, CARE, the Red Cross, or others are doing and, for example, spend $15 on earthquake relief in South Asia.

It would be a refusal to accept defeat, a way for people to engage with the world, and a way to satisfy the itch to spend money on the Web, merging the shopping impulse with the desire to do good.

The Internet deserves credit for creating a two-way street, offering reams of news but also a fast, simple way for people to donate money or pass on facts. One need not wait for an Eleanor Roosevelt or a Gandhi to lead. One person can act. And this interaction between the individual and the globe reinvigorates the idea that knowledge is power by linking knowledge, action, and positive change.

One way to view the recent run of disasters is as practice practice learning about natural disasters and entrenched poverty, practice responding without despair, and practice building a better world. Thanks to common technology, this season of practice can grow into an era of habit.

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™2005 WGBH Educational Foundation and Vulcan Productions, Inc. Major funding for Rx for Survival – A Global Health Challenge has been provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Merck Company Foundation.