Things are getting slighty ridiculous.
I have posted twice now on piracy. That is honestly about as much attention as I would like to give them on this blog. Yes, they are a serious threat to aid logistics, and yes, they specialise in spectacular actions that are fine to generate breathless comment — but they are definitely not the most important issue in aid work, or even aid logistics.
Yet the last couple of weeks they have suddenly entered the consciousness of the public; suddenly everybody and their various aunts and uncles are scrambling to get on board and get their part of the booty. [Okay, enough pirate-related imagery, already. I will stop now.]
Just have a look at this graph from Google Trends:
Have a close look at the bottom part of the graph, which traces how often news articles refer to pirates, and note the sharp increase over the last month or so (the spikes in the top graph are related to losses of the baseball team). It now has come to the point where TV shows will follow pirates and the actions against them.
So what caused this spike? Only one thing: for the first time, pirates hijacked a ship under the US flag. Now what does that say about the media — and about us?
