Wednesday 14 April 2010

The Way We Live Now

Sometimes I shock myself. I do wonder if human beings really deserve the name - if to be labelled 'human' is to imply being humane. I know from observation that my attitude to other people is generally on the right side of the dividing line between concern and indifference, and yet...

An example. I lent a DVD box set to a colleague at work. This woman suffers from ill-health, and disappeared from work for a few weeks without explanation. And it was perfectly plain to me that I was far more concerned about whether I would see my DVDs again than...you get the picture. Of course if someone had offered me the straight choice of the importance of any person's life versus a DVD set, I'd say, 'the person' and yet...

And yet...

I make the opposite choice every day. It was worth nearly £90 to me to have the Beckett on Film set a few years back - how many of those little anti-diarrhea packets(at a cost then of about 3p) is that? Every one a life potentially saved. Three thousand people 'dead' so I can watch some plays.

Of course it's not quite that simple. The link is not that direct, and even if it was...I could give that money away - but there are all sorts of complexities involving what charities actually do with their money, to do with patronising attitudes and self-conscious self-righteousness and guilt. And yet...

History is written by the 'winners'. What history are we writing now (assuming 'we' win in the battle against climate change)? Among my immediate circle on facebook far more people seemed concerned about the Xmas No. 1 than about any of the issues surrounding the Copenhagen Summit. No, scratch that - no one seemed concerned about Copenhagen until I brought it up on my page. This is not to trumpet my own dedication to the cause; since then I've read Climate Progress ( http://climateprogress.org/ ) posts with dutiful semi-attention, told myself this is the month I must go to the local FOE meeting - and done, in fact, fuck all.

This blog has been a continually difficult prospect for me because I am not an ordered thinker. Everything that comes into my mind brings up too many associated ideas, too many possibilities. Maybe it's a symptom of the times; the world we live in now is impossibly complex. For every opinion there are five alternative views. So I can only speak for myself, for what I know to be true from my own inner sense of how things are/how they should be. Of course there is immense value, immense aesthetic and even spiritual value in Fiction Books or great films, and even the question of what is to be the Xmas No. 1 is bound up with questions of whether we respond to the easy and superficial or the more challlenging. It is better to care about something than about nothing.

And yet...

I began today by saying that I shock myself. But the real problem is that I do not shock myself. I am so immersed in a certain lifestyle that I have no easy way of tapping into the reality of much that happens in the world, and most of the time I hardly give that insensitivity a thought. I bought four books from Oxfam yesterday, but not to support charity - and without a thought in my mind about the money involved other than that I shouldn't be spending it when I have 1000 unread books already at home. Fuck your starving families, I have books in my kitchen cupboards instead of food, and some of my friends think that's really weird. If only, if only that was the weirdest fucking thing about the way I live.