It must be all well and good to sympathize with the victims of tragedies, and in my more cynical moments, I wonder at how people can pour their hearts out in response to such lyrically “beautiful” disasters. They evoke the sentiments, the feelings. It would be a blanket observation to say that we all commiserate with heart-felt words and then dismiss the whole thing with a whisk of the keyboard, or the errant remote control.
It must be why soap operas are so popular; for an hour we can weep with 2-dimensional characters and think to ourselves “oh, this truly is love/grace/courage,” and then return to our daily mediocre lives, fulfilled and sure in the knowledge that we’ve somehow grown or contributed to the advancement of mankind by our own increased karmic relevance to the world: all this after one fricking hour’s worth of cookie-cutter soap operas.
It’s hard to criticize “fire-and-forget” one-time donations to charitable causes because, essentially, the schmuck who rails against these is the one, in the opinion of the givers, sitting on his hands and doing absolutely jackshit about “it”. “Armchair critics” they are called.
A few years ago, I read somewhere about a blogger, a lady, who asked for donations on the internet because she was out of work. All of a sudden, there was a veritable windfall of cash from well-meaning folks. It was as if the world online had decided to accord itself an implicit godhood, redolent with all the trappings of a benevolent gift-giver. It was bewildering, but even gods become skeptical to repeat prayers after a while.
Such a veritable font of good feeling, this. I can almost picture a seal clapping with its flaps with a dumb, vapid smile. Is this an infantilisized attitude? Are we, by our transient contributions, reliving some Edenic innocence?
This global “unity of feeling” makes me gag because it stirs up sentiments that I know will remain genuine as long as the news about tragic events in Timbuktoo are splayed on papers and web portals. Beyond that, we’ll focus on the next tragedy to hit someone else’s shores, forests, rocky mountains and such, then we can begin the whole cycle yet again.
What genuine delight.
Has anyone ever considered the fact that as the world becomes essentially ‘nearer’ in all the important ways, your own private little hell becomes smaller and smaller? And not exposed, no, your space doesn’t become exposed to prying eyes, it just becomes infinitely smaller. By default, you are suddenly a citizen of the world, and by default you are now part of a global mass of breathing flesh and bone.
The cloying, suffocating stench of human nearness is frustrating. There are no spaces now beyond the nominal skin, it appears.
You could be walking down the street, minding your own business, and be assaulted by ads selling Gucci bags or Calvin Kleins; it’s as if some wicked mental assault from beyond your shores just reaching out to grab your attention for a few precious seconds. You are bludgeoned, in those stolen seconds, by presumed identity, presumed image, presumed desirability. It doesn’t end there, though; when you get back home, you think about the various ways in which globalization has robbed us of something. It’s self-perpetuating, you see?
Goth chicks and alternative lifestyles — check. Suicidegirls looks to be that kind of place; do you remember how grunge became “in”? The grunge look, the grunge this, the alternative ’style’. Flannel shirts and cargo pants for RM 300 to partake of the self-declared affiliations with disaffected, anti-establishment coolness.
And now it’s cool, humane and very cosmopolitan of you to wire a few dollars to the help-new-orleans-get-back-on-its-feet fund.
It’s as if the things we do — now compartmentalized, labelled and categorized — now define for ourselves our own image to ourselves. We “want to be this way”, therefore we seek the cheap palliative and imbibe the quick restorative.
And so we’ll all wake up tomorrow refreshed and restored, safe in the knowledge that we’ve made some hungry baby go to sleep in the other side of the world with a full belly. How very National Geographic, how very CNN.
