Cause and Effect World

Why you should care about Kenya

Wonkette wickedly makes the point that people are not likely to care about the horror in Kenya - trapping people in churches and homes and burning them alive.  There likely would be more of an outcry if it was elephants being torched.

But as I was recently told by my guide on a walking safari in South Africa, if I was charged by a black rhino he would definitely not shoot the rhino to save me.  His thinking was since there are only about 2,000 black rhinos in the world and billions of people, it was not worth killing a black rhino to save little old me.  (He assured me that if I were charged by a white rhino, he would shoot, since white rhinos are plentiful). 

So, yes, people are likely to care more about elephants than people in Kenya, which is horrifying for anyone connected with Kenya in any way, horrifying for people who concern themselves with the downtrodden, horrifying for anyone with a lot of mirror-neurons - those neurons that cause us to feel the emotion experienced by someone we are watching.

However these reasons often make conservatives and libertarians very nervous - it seems wrong to them to do something simply out of altruism and is likely to end up causing unintended, and in their view, often negative, consequences.

However, there are perfectly selfish reasons to care about what is going on in Kenya.  Remember when the US Embassies were bombed in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998?  No?  Well, quite frankly, it really didn’t get that much media coverage - not in a sustained way.  Most of the people killed were Kenyans or Tanzanians, the bombings occurred in countries that were far away and not that familiar, and quite frankly, the news was filled with news of adultery, lies, older man with a younger woman, a cuckolded wife, a betraying friend, investigations, did he or didn’t he…..

But think about it.  The ruling party’s (our guys) electoral victory was sketchy at best, and the folks who lost are angry enough to commit the kind of violence that we’ve just witnessed.  You think that we aren’t in some way going to be involved?

I gotta dig deeper into this, but for now let’s just say, promoting good governance and poverty are security issues for the United States.  And that’s a reason to get involved that even a conservative could support.