What Do I have in Common with Zarqawi?

We're both "data passers," says Daniel Henninger in today's WSJ:

Television's round-the-clock feeds of raw images, such as we are seeing now from Thailand, India and Sri Lanka, are known in some circles as "data passing." In daily life or as now amid catastrophic disaster, technology pushes large amounts of information at us--data--that we don't have time to process and that we don't altogether comprehend. Who has time to think much about the images hop-scotching around Sri Lanka, India or Malaysia when there's more drama on the way, and more after that? The visual of shattered villages and broken families enthralls the eyes, but the emotions, like a pinball machine banged too hard, finally "tilt" and stop.

This is not a neutral phenomenon. The world's leading expert on how emotional, data-passed news can obliterate important context is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His homicidal bombings can't kill Iraq's 25 million people, but he knows that images and tales of sudden death will suppress calmer, constructive portrayals of Baghdad's five million people restoring their lives to normalcy.

Here's some context for 2004: The number of human beings who died of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa was about two million. The number of people who died of bad water and bad sanitation was more than two million. These deaths broke families and even whole communities with a force as hard as that in Sumatra this week. What is the answer?

The simple and obvious answer sits inside this final piece of disaster data: The Red Cross estimates that for the past 10 years when a natural disaster occurred in a developing country, the number of people killed was 589; but in what the Red Cross calls a country of "high human development" it was 51. That's 11 to 1. (Also, there's no full-time throat-slitting in countries of "high human development.")

The answer is to compress this ratio. We won't do that with aid, important as that is right now. We will never do it with the United Nations. The way we move the world's most vulnerable people away from the high risks of 11 and toward the relative safety of 1 is with the meat and potatoes of politics.

I may believe that liberal market economics joined to repeatable free elections is the way to a safer, more prosperous life for the Sri Lankas and Iraqs of the world. But belief alone never turned rocks into silver, even when all the world believed Poseidon caused earthquakes. Political work is the means the civilized world has for replacing men and ideas that are dumb or dangerous with something better. In the aftermath of 2004's too-numerous unnatural deaths, the only resolution possible is to re-enter the arena of politics and fight the good, slow fight. It's all we've got, and it is enough.

Contrary to the views of idiots, natural disasters like the Indian ocean tsunami make freedom and economic development--and fighting for both--all the more important.