aerasio

A touch of sadness

My buddy youwei has been talking about some issues on his blog recently, about cruelty and environmental concerns and general nastiness in society. I think its a worthy discussion even if not much is gonna happen even if we talk about it. All we can do is pray I guess : P

To expand on what he referred to as "the selfishness of man", it seems that often we quail in the face of the cruelty our fellows have inflicted on others. We hear the news about starving children in Bosnia, genocide in Darfur, devatsation in Lebanon but we don't do much about it. A reporter filming a grisly scene of war in a Hollywood movie (I can't remember the name) makes this comment after being asked whether the footage will help the suffering people in the war-torn 3rd world country they are in: "People will look at it and go, "oh thats awful". And then they'll sit down, have dinner with their families and forget about it."

We receive horrible news often on a daily basis, everyday there is a new tragedy for our sympathy and mourning, delivered to us in a crisp english accent from the mass media. If one pays attention, we realize that there is so much devastation and horror taking place as we speak that it is mind-numbing. Atrocities are committed faster than we can even think about and as such, we don't bother. The result of this bombardment of horror is desensitization and apathy.

Maybe part of the reason why we don't care is because we don't see any way we can help the aggrieved. Maybe thats true. Humanity has always shot itself in the foot in increasingly new and novel ways. We race to invent interesting ways to blow ourselves up, choke ourselves with inhaled tar and/or poison ourselves with pollution. With all this rot going on, its hard not to believe that humanity is bringing itself to ruin.

In the face of all this tragedy, it is easier to turn our minds to what we think we can change, like injustice toward animals! Instead of bothering with the hard problems, lets deal with the cute fuzzy-wuzzies and go on strike so we can make life harder for everyone. Lets cast into doubt all our sources of food, while Children in Africa starve, so we can feel better about ourselves!

It's not like I'm against animal rights or anything, but like I commented on Youwei's blog, in the face of cruelty we inflict and let happen to our own kind, the stuff we do to animals is inconsequential by comparison. I say save the oppressed in Darfur before the rabbits! Too bad nobody seems to care...



On a more cheerful note, Yunxing's birthday should be somewhere in the region of this week. Happy Birthday Yunxing!

So said Aerasio at 22:14