I've been a subscriber to Reference.com's On This Day daily email offering for several years. It's one of a few email newsletters that I subscribe to which haven't been replaced by RSS feeds. Another is Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day which, if you are interested in the English language, I highly recommend. But I digress.
The On This Day newsletter presents various snippets of information relevant to the day of the year, listing events which took place during the last two or three thousand years. The more recent events tend to be biased towards those that occurred in the USA, or featured Americans in some way, but nevertheless, I find it a useful source to help me understand the world we live in, and how we got to be the way we are.
An example from today's newsletter includes this item:
2003 - New York Governor George Pataki pardoned the late comedian Lenny Bruce for his 1964 obscenity conviction.
Not quite as long as it took the Catholic church to 'forgive' Galileo, but still a long time.
The USA-centric viewpoint does, on occasion, result in people being labelled American when in fact they were not (Florence Nightingale comes to mind), but Reference.com are open to correction if errors are pointed out. Bearing in mind that Reference.com is an American organisation, the bias is not unexpected.
But then, there are biases which are not so obvious, until you dig a little deeper. Here's two consecutive items from December 3rd.
1979 - Eleven people were killed and others injured in a crush of fans at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum, where the British rock group The Who was performing.
1984 - One of the worst industrial disasters occurred as a pesticide plant located in the densely populated region of Bhopal in central India leaked a highly toxic cloud of methyl isocyanate into the air.
Where's the bias? As written, the 1979 item is about people, whereas the 1984 item is about industry. The thing is that in Bhopal, the number of people who died immediately was over 2000, and that number later rose to over 3000. However, to put it bluntly, they were all Johnny Foreigners, so there wasn't any need to mention them, right?
I'm sure that whoever wrote that item wasn't consciously ignoring the people who lost their lives. After all, it's a tendency we all have. It's that 'in group, out group' thing, where we place more importance on people who are part of 'our group'. It would be nice to think that at some point in the future we'll have learnt to value everyone equally, no matter where on the planet they live.
A pipe dream? Not if we work towards making it so. Pass it on.
There wasn't any copyright info, but I found this drawing at a blog called To New Waves. The more you look the more you see. The original at the blog is a slightly higher resolution.
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