Those gut-wrenching pictures showing tens of thousands of people dying from starvation or disease in Central Africa haven't been leading the newspapers or television news in recent days.
So even though the latest crisis in Rwanda is far from over, many of us here in the United States will assume - or at least pretend - that it is. We'll go about our business, and if we think at all about somebody else's troubles, they'll no doubt be closer to home. We'll forget all about Africa, Bosnia or the other major trouble spots until the next humanitarian calamity comes along and dominates the news.This is probably normal. Most people I know, whether they be Americans, Europeans, Asians or Africans, don't spend their days agonizing over this or that far-off disaster. They have too many problems of their own.
And in many cases, they've seen the pictures and read the grim stories too many times to be shocked anymore. Today's dying child in Rwanda has come to look not all that different from the one they saw two months ago in Haiti, two years ago in Somalia or a decade ago in Ethiopia.
Human catastrophe, it appears, is becoming almost commonplace. And the more common it becomes, the more we tend to find it boring, sometimes even annoying.
International charitable organizations know a variant of this phenomenon very well. They call it "donor fatigue" and say it usually happens when people in the wealthier industrialized nations get tired of being asked over and over again to help solve other peoples' problems.
Increasingly, you'll hear people saying that enough is enough, that America has to stop worrying about places like Bosnia, Cambodia, Haiti and Rwanda and start looking out for itself.
It's the same mixture of despair and anger that's behind efforts in Florida and California to limit immigration, or at least make the federal government help pay for some of the services used by newcomers from abroad. It's also behind the U.S. government's reaction to the Haitian boat people in June or the latest threats from Fidel Castro to unleash another wave of Cuban immigrants toward southern Florida.
Those who are fortunate simply want to seal themselves off from those less fortunate.
Barriers to immigration are going up everywhere, not only here, but in Western Europe.
Will we be able to shut out the rest of the world while we tend to our own business?
The Chinese tried it 2,300 years ago by building a great wall to keep out the barbarians. They failed.
And in this modern, much more interrelated world of ours, we too will fail if we try to turn our backs to the calamities all around us.