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The current 2020 year has brought a lot of disasters, catastrophes, and distress situations to humanity. This essay will touch upon the coverage of such situations in media and its consequences. Namely, an overview of the recent floods and landslides in Vietnam will be provided in this paper. Furthermore, a likely reaction of different personalities to such events will be discussed along with the way they would depict a disaster for future generations. The list of people whose viewpoint of the event will be considered includes a community leader, a biographer, a historian, and a social scientist.
First of all, the catastrophic situation in Vietnam should be described in detail. Intense flooding and landslides are the result of two severe storms, Storm Linfa and Storm Nangka, which occurred in Vietnam at the beginning of October. After they hit the central region of the country, it led to rainfalls six times stronger than average. Even now, some of the provinces are still submerged with the water level reaching up to 3 meters.
The floods and landslides have caused serious casualties and damage to agriculture. At this point, more than 100 people are confirmed to be dead with 22 soldiers considered missing (Hollingsworth, 2020). About 90,000 people were forced to be evacuated from their homes. More than 7,000 hectares of agriculture crops have been flooded and destroyed since the beginning of the disaster. More than 600,000 of livestock have been killed or went missing as the result of the storms. Highways and roads across several Vietnamese provinces have been severely damaged.
Although the Vietnamese authorities were aware of the possible threat of natural disasters every year and were prepared for such situation, a potential danger has not been considered to be this tremendous. The current disaster has been named shocking and one of the worst in several decades. Furthermore, it is likely that the scale of the floods will worsen due to Storm Saudel that is currently moving towards Vietnam over from the Philippines.
Despite the fact that this catastrophe has not yet come to an end, it has already been and will be retold by different people to those who did not participate in it and did not suffer from it. The approach to the depiction of this disaster depends on a person’s occupation and role in the society. The purpose of this paper is to find and emphasize possible differences in the narrative of the event made by people whose social standpoints vary.
The first group of people whose possible depiction of the current disaster will be taken into consideration is community leaders. In Vietnam, they are found in urban communities, as well as remote rural settings. Regardless of their location, Vietnamese local authorities tend to be involved in the life of the place they are responsible for. Thus, some scholars define the task of community leaders as the obligation to mobilize resources at their disposal and receive resources if there is a shortage in order to achieve a common goal (Lamm et al., 2017). This fact presupposes that community leaders in regions that suffered serious losses due to the disaster would be involved in the resolution of the crisis or its aftermath.
Therefore, this would give a community leader a perspective of the events not only as a survivor but also as a direct authority responsible for the lives of others during and after the catastrophe. In theory, a person holding leadership over a local community would be, to an extent, involved in the evacuation process; for example, making sure that the information about it is available to everyone. Essentially, a community leader would be able to describe not only the events as a witness and a survivor, but also the formal procedures of evacuation, being in a crisis center, and food rationing.
Further, the point of view of a biographer will be taken into account. Biographers’ way of depicting events differs significantly from that of the participants. Usually, a biographer is someone who describes the life of a single person. Thus, for such scholar to write about the recent floods in Vietnam would mean to write about someone, to whom this event was of great importance. For example, a prolific poet, a journalist, or a director, whose entire life and, in addition, career has been influenced by the catastrophe.
However, it would mean that the disaster itself would only be one chapter among many others. Even if it would be mentioned throughout the whole biographic work, the main focus of the author would be on the person and how they were impacted by the disaster, not the catastrophe itself. Apart from that, it would only include a single family’s perspective of the events, and not the big picture of crucial statistical data. Most importantly, “in attempting to capture past lives and record them, biographers or scholars exert an art, the outcome of which is a (re-)construction” (Parey, 2018, para. 2). As a rule, a work of a biographer is not an absolutely accurate depiction.
Moving on to the next group of people, this paper should touch upon historians. Ideally, history is considered an objective exploration of the events of the past in order to understand and document historical evolution (Stansfield-Cudworth, 2015). It is not always so, but historians mostly tend to describe past disasters in the most precise manner, including statistical data, the public reaction, and the authorities’ role in resolving the crisis. Essentially, historians provide the most accurate depiction of an event including its long-term consequences among other things.
Finally, the role of a social scientist in the reflection of an important event is to be discussed. The involvement of social scientists in disaster studies helps humanity understand the complex processes of accepting, acknowledging, and reacting to a catastrophe, by a single individual, as well as society on the whole (Burger et al., 2019). Thus, a social scientist depicting a significant event would be more focused not on the situation itself and its consequences, but rather on human behavior and the community’s response to it.
In conclusion, four different possible perspectives of an important event were studied in this paper. It was established that, depending on a person’s approach to a situation, potential visions and depictions of it can be contrasting. Thus, a community leader, as a direct participant, would illustrate the events subjectively, as a survivor and a person involved in the resolution of the crisis. A biographer would only concentrate on a single individual’s experience with the event and its consequences on their life, but scientific data would not be of essence. On the other hand, a historian would depict a disaster in great detail, including statistical data and the aftermath throughout a prolonged period of time after the event. A social scientist would focus on the behavior of people in such situations and the complex processes of accepting and responding to a traumatic occurrence. Ultimately, all four occupations’ approaches to a catastrophe may overlap in places but do not fully coincide.
References
Burger, A., Talha, O., Kennedy, W. G., & Crooks A. T. (2019). Computational social science of disasters: Opportunities and challenges. Future Internet, 11(5), 103. Web.
Hollingsworth, J. (20201). More than 100 dead as Vietnam reels from ‘worst floods in decades’. CNN. Web.
Lamm, K. W., Carter, H. S., Lamm, A. J., & Lindsey, A. B. (2017). Community leadership: A theory-based model. Journal of Leadership Education, 16(3), 118-133.
Parey, A. (2018). The art of recording li(v)es in A. S. Byatt’s fiction. Études Britanniques Contemporaines, 54. Web.
Stansfield-Cudworth, R. E. (2015). Archivists and historians: Perspectives on the place of historical research in archival practice [Unpublished master’s dissertation]. University of Aberystwyth.
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