Clowns in the circus of war
Social media continues to proliferate with hate, war, atrocities and stupidity. This is what the abundance of information, the dismissing of the barriers of time and space has brought to us. At our finger tips, with nothing more than the slightest of motor muscle action, we scroll past harrowing images and distressing sounds — unless we keep our devices muted.
The worst part? Despite our best, we know that the deep, unsettling truth is that we are desensitised by even the worst iteration of our phenomenological experience. We hear the mothers’ cry for their sons, and we see the children scraping through rubble, yet what really preoccupies us is the horrors that we have in our own mind and heart. We muffle the haunting cry of our own ineptitude, our inability — which is what makes us so painfully human — to bend the ark of the world to our will. Or maybe we are angry that some humans are able to bend this ark, but they choose to commit evil with this power.
It is unfathomable, unbearable, to sit there and do nothing, so we share the imagery, and we gather our friends and family to protest on the streets, hoping that our rallying cries can pierce through the sounds of bombs, that our common faith in humanity and our continuously misplaced faith in gods can shatter through the cold ‘rationality’ of a sovereign state’s right to defend itself.
What is most exhausting is that we, those who have to worry about bills, our own family, and our own every day survival, are the ones who are asked to carry this moral burden. Whereas those who have carved a career from the granite of progress and weaved their moral fabrics from the cloth of ‘common sense’, sitting on top of an ivory tower, are free to make the most immoral of decisions.
When the media circus moves onto the next tragic community, we, the citizens of the world, will be left to pick-up the manure and the pop-corn boxes that litter our consciousness. Where as the clowns, the magicians and the harlequins of this whole apparatus will continue to prey on the unconscious need of the populace to remain entertained, regardless of the ontological consequences.