A Spiritually Enlightening Online Magazine. March Theme: "In Touch" Volume 1 Issue 3 ISSN# 1708-3265
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Who are the Real Survivors? by David Suzuki PhD 
You'd have to have been living under a rock not to hear about the mega-hit television show "Survivor". Somehow this 'reality' game show has actually become news and regularly makes it's way to the front pages of newspapers across North America. The first series of the game revolved around 16 contestants stranded on a desert island in the South China Sea who competed to "Outwit, Outplay and Outlast" the others for 39 days to win the prize of $1 million. It's a novel idea, to be sure, and viewers seem to enjoy the show's social dynamics and exotic settings. But unintentionally the show also gave us an indication of how far removed people in the developed world are from the reality of life, which still faces the majority of the inhabitants of our planet. Human civilization has existed for thousands of years. But most of the modern conveniences, which the contestants so badly miss, like telephones, refrigeration, email and television, have only been around since the turn of the last century. Some are even less than a decade old! Like most people in the developed world, the majority of the castaways on "Survivor" have a hard time fending for themselves without the help of modern technology. They manage to crack a few coconuts and in one show even found some tapioca, but other than that they had no idea of which plants were edible and which were poisonous, or how to obtain enough protein. Only one member of the group (the eventual winner of the first competition) was capable of catching fish. Although the contestants are certainly roughing it, they are hardly abandoned. They receive ample rice to eat and have access to basic medical items like insect repellent, sunscreen, Band-Aids and iodine. And they have helicopters waiting to airlift them to a hospital in case of an emergency.
But seemingly lost on the contestants, crew and producers, is the fact that, while the survivors pine for "normal" food like burgers and pizza, not too far away millions of people actually are living off of a couple of bowls of rice a day - many for their entire lives. These people are not even afforded the very basics of health care, like vaccines or antibiotics. For them, insect repellent to help ward off malarial mosquitoes is an unattainable luxury. According to the World Bank, the real survivors are the 1.3 billion people who live on $1 or less a day, and the three billion who live on $2 or less a day. While the contestants and crew of "Survivor" complain about the lack of hot showers and gourmet food, 1.4 billion people still do not have access to safe drinking water. In Indonesia and Vietnam, near the island where the first "Survivor" was filmed, more than one-third of the children are underweight. In some South-Asian countries, up to 50 per cent of children are born with low birth weights, caused by malnutrition. The reality is, "Survivor" is a rich person's game. We can afford to be titillated by the idea of struggling to survive with a bare minimum of resources. For us, it's a spectator sport - a pleasant diversion from our hectic modern lives. For the contestants, its fun because they know they get to go home at the end, and one of them would be $1 million richer. Their Asian neighbours have no such incentives. If the lesson learned by contestants on the show was that they should not take modern life for granted, perhaps the next "Survivor" should take place in the slums of Calcutta or Manila. Then perhaps contestants wouldn't just learn to appreciate all they have at home, but also what most others do not.
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