We live in a day and age of hyper hype. As I have maintained in these pages before it is completely wrong to blame Social Media for the state of the world and society, they are just tools (be it Facebook, Twitter or even WordPress where you are reading this) and as with all tools they depend wholly on the user. One thing which Social Media may bear some responsibility for, although the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves, is the hyper focus on one issue at a time. Issues rise in society and one sees much concerted effort being channelled into the one issue and then the new flavour of the month, the new hype, comes along and what came before lies forgotten. The saddest, well one of, aspects of this is that the issues which arise are not new. In the last year or so we have been witness to a movement called #MeToo where women and men, yes men too, nothing is made in isolation and both men and women have been making concerted efforts against sexual assault even if that is not reflected in the media and the notion of ‘all men are bad, they all generalise’ (umm), came forward to say that sexual assault is wrong. When #MeToo broke two things were rather surprising to me. 1) when an actress came forward and said ‘Harvey Weinstein broke into my boat at Cannes and when I woke up was standing next to me masturbating’ the response she got at breakfast was ‘that’s just Harvey’ showing that such knowledge was well known prior, leading to Plato’s noting that ‘your silence is your consent’ (more in which later) and 2) even though one of the highest profile cases which got the proverbial ball rolling was a male actor speaking out about the sexual assault he suffered as a minor from the actor Kevin Spacey the male role as the victim was quickly forgotten as it became a women’s crusade, supported by men. This showed, quite clearly, one thing, our perception of things is subjective, and we view the entirety of creation from the perspective of us like opera singers penning our memoirs ‘Me Me Meeeeee’.
One of the big issues this month (Nov/early Dec) is domestic abuse. A staggering number of people (women and men) suffer from or have suffered from domestic abuse. This can be psychological, sexual, physical and so on and so forth, each as evil as the last no matter how innocuous it may seem. That this is being brought to the public attention, even if just for this ‘news cycle’, is a good thing, no doubt, but here is the wider context. Many who are shocked, repulsed and completely against domestic abuse happily watched the 2018 football word cup in Russia. Sporting events are a wonderful source of soft power. A nation/people can do terrible things but as soon as a mass escapism event comes it is all forgotten. Brazil had its slums painted to be attractive to football tourists and is now in an economic slump (and has just elected a President from the far right who wants to cut down the Amazon rainforest) after having spent most of its money on football stadiums miles away from where they could be useful, China’s human rights violations were overlooked for the Olympics and the next world cup is in the footballing legacy giant…Qatar. During the year of the World Cup, the Russian government repealed laws protecting women/men from domestic abuse. Now if your partner decides to play a round of golf with your face…meh, yet all of the people who always or are now shouting #MeToo or that domestic abuse is bad took a break from their moral outrage to go ‘yay, go sports even though I don’t like it normally, did you see Neymar dive, not that I know what a Neymar is…’.
It seems, as illustrated above, that our ability to care is directly in proportion to how it effect/affects us personally and if it is something which effects/affects others then as long as my own interests (even ones as asinine as film and sport (note: I’m a big fan of both)) are not impacted I may pay attention to it.
Genocide is something which is hard to define or show or prove etc. but I would argue that many people dying for a not particularly good reason constitutes in genocide. Over nine million people die each year from starvation (that’s 9,000,000 you or me’s) in a world which has too much of everything. If nine million people died each year from a single war/person/group this would be called genocide but as it is a small thing which does not capture the public imagination (except every 20/30 years or so with rock concerts) most people neither know or care and as it does not effect ‘me’ personally then, well, meh, the same people who get upset when a historical document says ‘a man can’t live by bread alone’ (focusing on the word ‘man’ and not on the notion of sustenance).
Millions of people are dying each year due to the indifference of the you’s and me’s so just to leave you with a quick question, if millions of people are dying from starvation, and we are throwing away food, are we complicit in genocide?
‘till next time
thegreaterfool2016 