Why Do We Care Or Not Care?

For all the death and destruction around the globe, there is a story at Yahoo News, which tells us why we care, when tragedies occur. So as bad as humans can be, there is this positive trait that we have as part of our hardwiring.
I Hope you Enjoy the story:

The dire situations in cyclone-battered Myanmar and quake-tossed southwestern China and the impulse of many to offer relief have a lot to do with human nature. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors likely did it, and non-human primates do it. We are hard-wired to help others, to drop everything in crisis situations, scientists say.

"People do really respond in these crisis situations where it's really a short-term matter of life or death," said Daniel Kruger at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. The motivation to give dates back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, he said. Some non-human primates also have been shown to step in during a crisis to help their kin or even humans.

Myanmar is an acute case, with the death toll at nearly 78,000, though expected to surpass 100,000, and up to 2.5 million people considered severely affected. And major relief efforts have mounted since Cyclone Nargis struck on May 2. In China, millions of dollars are also pouring into Sichuan Province, where more than 34,000 are reported dead and 4.8 million were left homeless from the recent earthquake and its aftershocks.

Several factors make acute disasters like these different from other human hardships, including their short-term nature, widespread images that tug at our heart strings, and the high benefits relative to costs of helping.

LINK TO FULL STORY