From evergreen apples, through wars and famine, to Austrian torture cellars: Do we really need to know?
So, I’m having my daily dose of online newspapers - and all the usual suspects make their unsurprising entrances: Obama & Hillary in the US, Gordon Brown & Boris Johnson in England, the torture cellar of yet another Austrian monster, und so weiter, und so weiter.
Then I read about a pet turtle that returned to its deliriously happy owners after a two years’ absence - and that Australian scientists have developed an apple that stays green after you’ve cut it open. And maybe it’s just me being in a bad mood today but those last stories did irritate me somewhat. Not so much the turtle and its happy owners. I just read about the latest developments in Zimbabwe, where many schools haven’t been able to open their doors after the holiday because so many teachers have been arrested, tortured and killed recently by Mugabe thugs that the rest don’t dare to show up for work. Having read yet another piece about Mugabe, reading about the reunion of a turtle with its owners does come as a relief.
That apple story did piss me off though. I couldn’t help but think: Just eat the damn thing before it turns brown, you idiots. It’s quite monstrous, the way the decadent West spends millions and millions on this kind of nonsense - and on developing ever more food and drink stuff with fewer and fewer calories, so the people can stuff their fat faces without becoming even more stupidly fat than they already are - while millions of other people are starving to death.
Still, it’s a bit unfair to blame an evergreen apple (and the people who developed and wrote about it) for all the ills in the world. Same with that turtle: you can correctly claim that there are more important things to discuss than the fate of one turtle - and yet, not talking about the turtle won’t stop a mine killing yet another American soldier, or make a tornado change its destructive course or stop anyone getting killed when their bus crashes.
There’s also that other thing: that I’m neither really touched by the turtle story nor by some bus accident in some very far off place - and I’m not even feeling all that guilty about that either, to be honest. Can we care about the accidental death of people we’ve never met and would never have met, unless and until they died in a way that made it newsworthy enough to write a short article about it? Should we care? In principle, I believe we should. As a human being one should not accept that millions of fellow human beings starve to death or get butchered by their own evil regimes or get blown up in senseless wars.
And yet, all of this remains mostly abstract, for most of the time. The outrage and solidarity don’t last that long. You read another story about Iraq and you mutter something about murderous necon bastards - or you curse yet another Jihadist who calls for yet another 9/11. You get disgusted over an Austrian cellar story, or about some silly apple (or celeb) story, or about famine in the Horn of Africa…
That’s the problem with this rolling news kind of world we have created: too many stories competing for our attention - and we move with incredible speed from Paris Hilton to Iraq, from lost turtles to Gaza, from Hubble pictures to Holocaust memorial services. Does any bit of news still really move us, apart from the truly monstrous? And apart from the cheap kind of sentimentality and group hysteria that follow the death of a princess, or the disappearance of one pretty, blue-eyed child. What is it with people that they can get this sentimental and stupid over one death, while they happily ignore the death of millions of others? Is that a different topic though - or the same one, really? People love and need stories, so maybe people need to personalise some news stories, while others are too gruesome or too distant to be embraced on that sentimental, Oprah like ‘I feel your pain’ scale.
Anyway, I don’t have any real answers. The world is as it is - with a large majority of people living quite horrible, poverty and war stricken lives, while the rest live in decadent luxury, worrying about their weight, or browning apples. And the news itself has become a kind of entertainment industry, where stories about rape, murder and famine will always be followed by a reassuring bit of light relief nonsense about a returning turtle - and no matter how many horrific news stories have gone before, nothing will ever wipe away the smile of the people presenting the weather at the end of yet another news show.
The dilemma will remain, of course: that by being flooded with all kinds of different but mostly horrible stories, we also become immune to them. The more we watch, the less real these stories become to us; the more camera crews we send out to feed the rolling news machine, the less engaged we become on a personal level.
I don’t think this is a paradox that we can ever solve. I certainly don’t have the answers. I still feel that we need to watch the news though. We need to know - even if we can’t change things. I think that as humans we have the obligation to at least be witness to the suffering of our fellow human beings.
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