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You're cruel.
i think I made it almost to the third before the uncontrolable tears.
Oh man. Heartbreaking doesn't even begin to cover it. (The last two are humorous, though, if you can make it that far. Yes, really.)
I played this yesterday, I made it to two but that's the pregnancy hormones bawling for me.
I made it halfway through the third cartoon...
Not such a fun game. The second one was a killer (and then I had to stop).
Oh my God. Heartbreaking.
I started crying by the end of the first cartoon too.
I couldn't get past the second.
The second one did me in, too. No way could I go on.
I made it to the second cartoon before I choked up. But I read 9 other ones before I had to stop. Too damn much pain.
Makes you look at the 'problems' in your life a little differently.
I was getting choked up too until I started thinking that they were propaganda. I didn't see anything that would verify any of this actually happened.
And the one with the mother protecting her baby with her dead body and having written a message of love on her cell phone had urban legend scrawled all over it.
(Not that the earthquake wasn't a horrible thing and I'm sure you could find many horrific stories from it.)
If you don't believe the stories, then you don't believe them. Since these people's resources were essentially destroyed, it's going to be difficult to document a lot of what happened. Coco Wang isn't a sensationalist hack, however, he's a successful Chinese artist and writer, and collected the stories from newspaper reports.
Erin, things like this happened in NYC on 9/11. Why would The Chinese be any different? Would they love their children less, especially when a great percentage of them were only children? All children are very precious to the Chinese people, not just their own. Do you think that they care less about people trapped and dying? Does it make it easier to ignore if you say to yourself 'There's no proof that these are real.'? I'm appalled that they are so easy for you to dismiss and disgusted that you would have such total lack of compassion to brag about it in a public forum.
I look at them the same way I do war movies in that I know that the reality is infinitely worse than could ever be conveyed by a work of fiction, if in fact they are fiction. They weren't created to milk donations or for any other negative purpose. They were created to give the Chinese courage and a few rays of hope in the darkness caused by the deaths of 10's of thousands of people. I guess you are made uncomfortable by that light.
Sandi: Whooaa... what?!
The media in China isn't the same as the media here, as I'm sure you must be aware. There have been reports of them downplaying the bad that has come from the earthquakes and filling the newspapers with ones about heroics and nationalistic pride of dubious truth. I don't see how burying the facts under urban legends helps anyone but the happily deluded.
You even admit in your post that these probably aren't real. And yet for me to say that is horrendous, but for you to say that is a sign of great compassion and love.
Your reaction is very befuddling.
No, I didn't say I thought they weren't real. What I did say was even if they weren't, what difference would it make since the reality is surely worse.
What I was reacting to is your statement that 'I was getting choked up too until I started thinking that they were propaganda.'. You have no reason to believe that they are propaganda but you seem to want to use the possibility to make the bad feelings (choking up) go away. If you don't want to feel grief and pain over the death of all those people, that's your prerogative. But don't assume that others will blithely follow.
'Burying the facts under urban legend'...'the happily deluded'. Do you think these cartoons were created to make someone happy? And if they did soothe someone's broken heart, would that be such a sin.
I would say it's your reaction that is befuddling...and troubling.
You're flipping out because someone voiced that maybe the Chinese media would create nationalistic propaganda after a catastrophe.
Think about that.
You'd rather assume it's propaganda than shed tears, think about that. Why is it important to you to dismiss the pain of the Chinese people?
I really don't understand what you think the purpose of the propaganda would be. To make the disaster seem more, or less? Either way, what would be the point?
I got halfway through the 2nd strip (the mother who shielded her baby). Then I cried and had to close the browser window. Can't read that stuff at work.
I agree with a PP. You're cruel.
But thank you for sharing that.
Regarding the propaganda aspect. Well, duh. There was propaganda after 9/11. There was at stupid f'ing "War on Terror" that has cost the US trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. Of course governments are going exploit tragedies.
Doesn't make them any the less tragic.
Ok. Sandi doesn't understand what propaganda is and why governments would use it. That shines a whole new light in that discussion.
If you take Beach's last post with the first sentence of Sandi's second post, it's quite delightful.
Now they're at China 5.12 Earthquake Strips.
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