In November 2019, Australia’s government declared the country in a state of emergency because of dozens of fires that sprung up in New South Wales. They started at the beginning of the fire season, so they were expected to continue for months.
With this tragedy taking over the news outlets for a while, I have seen those same outlets and other online presences compare it to another awful incident — the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris last April. It seemed as if billionaires were lining up to help rebuild the cathedral.
As of late, some wealthy individuals have stepped up to help Australia — such as Kylie Jenner and Leonardo DiCaprio — but overall, it seems as if crowdfunding was the answer to the “Save Australia” movement, while billionaires automatically latched onto the Notre Dame cause.
By the beginning of January, Australia had raised more than $140 million. However, more than $1 billion in donations poured in for Notre Dame within days of the cathedral fire.
There could be many reasons for this. The Independent newspaper has pointed out that a good number of billionaires who own large companies have left behind massive carbon footprints. The Australian bushfires, along with the fires in California and the Amazon rainforest, have been blamed on climate change, so those billionaires might not want to connect their name to a problem that they may have helped to create.
However, in my view, the true problem lies in the comparison of donations. Why is that happening in the first place? There is an inherent problem in comparing donations, because who can say which disaster is worse than another? If more people had focused on the fires in Australia, someone probably would have complained about the lack of donations to a building as historically important as Notre Dame Cathedral. If they both had received an adequate amount of funds, someone would have brought up the need for more funding for urban schools, or for rebuilding in Puerto Rico after its natural disasters — or any number of other incidents.
With a world that is plagued by atrocities every day, there are only so many things that can be covered or talked about extensively. The point of the matter is, tragedies should not be compared. It is bad enough that so many are happening, but critiquing which people give to what tragedy may make them decide against giving at all, to avoid such criticism.
While that wouldn’t necessarily be the most mature way for donors to behave, it is something that activists should be concerned about. The rich shouldn’t be free from judgment just because they are rich, but we also shouldn’t say someone is wrong just because they aren’t donating to the exact cause we wish they would.
Isabella Astuto is in grade 11 at Lancaster Mennonite High School.
