Friday Bloody Friday : when terror leaves place to horror
Friday November 13h 2015, 9.30pm: a series of terrorist attacks swept Paris. 129 dead and more than 300 wounded
An attack seeking to create a climate of terror and insecurity, the deadliest that the country of equality, fraternity and freedom has known since the Second World War. Since I am French, I feel particularly touched and shocked like the majority of my compatriots. This happened in a place that I know very well since I have been there on multiple occasions.
However, although I am horrified by these attacks, I am just as horrified by the Lebanon attacks on the eve of the Parisian ones, by the fact that entire villages have been decimated in Nigeria by Boko Haram who have shot hundreds of children, or when they have decimated hundreds of students in Kenya and then by the deaths of thousands of Kurds in Syria and finally by the fact that the Indonesian forest burns for days, carrying people and animals, thus causing one of the biggest ecological disasters this year whose consequences will be dramatic for all of us. All of this so you can pay less on your cereals and Pringles.
Certainly, I tell myself that it could’ve been me in that concert hall or walking in the streets of the 11th district; I have realized that death could strike at any time in any given place, even in places where we’d think we are safe. And I think that this bothers and shocks most of the people. This has happened next door to us, not thousands of kilometers away. Like they say, out of sight, out of mind. It’s a classical human trait; we bury our heads in the sand in order not to see that the issues are not so far away after all, we pretend to be united in solidarity when this kind of tragedy is happening on a daily basis somewhere in the world, yet broadcasters prefer to highlight the latest Miley Cyrus scandal instead of these dramatic events. It sells better, they say.
Of course these events make me sad, since we have witnessed gratuitous, terrifying violence, but will I really be able to grieve when we are about to witness another failure of humanity? We think we have evolved across millennia, having learnt from our mistakes and moving towards doing better. But we take refuge behind the comfort that we have acquired, behind our electronic toys and virtual relationships, we express feelings via emoticons and we share our compassion via hashtag and profile pictures.
Violence is still very much appealing to many of us as a means for entertainment as it was back in the days of Roman arenas, except that today we claim to be against it. But we show images of dead bodies in newspapers using violent language such as massacre or war in order to sell more, we create video games whose goal is to satisfy our murderous instincts and we treat the planet and our own species with a cruelty that we all refuse to acknowledge. We blame individuals for the terrible, inhuman, stupid actions that they have committed, while we are incapable of blaming ourselves for the acts (just as cruel) that we engage in daily.
As Humans, we are so cruel that we kill 1900 animals per second in such terrible conditions that nobody dares to watch slaughterhouse videos and all this to throw away 600 of them per second. And this is without counting the animals that are killed for fun or the ones that are thrown out the car window while leaving on summer vacation as it’s not very convenient to have a dog tag along.
As Humans, we are so violent that we cause genocide by decimating living species just for our own pleasure and for being able to display trophies on top of our fireplace.
As Humans, we are so greedy that we prefer to deprive entire populations of resources in order to make a little bit more profit. We prefer to ignore the fact that what we consume is directly linked to the misery of hundreds of thousands of people.
As Humans, we are so selfish that we continue to consume too much despite the damage brought to the future of our children who will be left with nothing from the planet that we are enjoying today, with the exception of natural disasters, an acidic lifeless ocean, hundreds of millions of climate refugees, cockroaches and rats as 95% of animal life will have disappeared from Planet Earth.
As Humans, we are so stupid that we hide from these issues and pretend that they are those of another. And we pretend to sympathize when we change our Facebook profile photos with messages such as ‘je suis Charlie’ or ‘#prayforFrance’. Where were these messages when the Lebanese massacres happened or when 300 students were killed in Kenya? What do we do 3 days after these attacks? Are we doing more? Do we engage in humanitarian activities or do we consume better in order to create jobs for the desperate young Africans ready to listen to anybody who promises them a better life? Are we uniting to better fight prejudices or are we simply tending towards extremism and hate? I find it wonderful that the world is supporting a country online on social media but what are the concrete actions after changing your profile picture?
As Humans, we are so childish that we prefer to purchase the latest IPhone whose production leads to child exploitation to recover tantalum (which keeps the energy in the smartphones) from the mines in Congo, or to assemble parts in Chinese factories working more than 28 days per month, 13 hours per day. We want to ignore that manufacturing our favorite toys pollutes the environment to such extent that the river water in the producing countries is full of arsenic and other poisons causing cancers and mutations and killing slowly entire cities.
As Humans, we are so inhuman that we treat without respect the life around us, up to the point of suggesting that we don’t actually cherish it enough.
And yet, we are all revolting at a barbaric action that we are all directly or indirectly responsible for. If Daesh has managed so successfully to radicalize Africa, it’s partly because they know how to exploit the despair of entire populations with nothing other than the hope for a better life or at least for a life different from the one they are currently living. Daesh brainwashes naïve and uneducated young people (sometimes even children) by telling them that it’s Westerners’ fault that they don’t have anything today. They take for example the ‘western’ multinational companies operating in Africa that exploit so many natural resources that pollute us on a big scale (example Total) and enslave local populations who do not have other choice that going and working in mines under inhuman conditions, so that we can have the latest exactly-identical-Iphone5-with-the-exception-that-it-has-a-flash-in-front-to-make-selfies-at-night Iphone6 smartphone. We accept and we pretend not to see the cruelty that we demonstrate when we consume incessantly more products whose origin we don’t even know.
So, yes, when out of a sudden this violence is reflected in our streets, down here, this scares us, we start blaming others, we tell ourselves that we don’t understand each other, that we don’t do harm in our small comfortable lives, that these evil terrorists attack us because they are mean and they want to terrorize us by shooting at us in our own land, killing our children and our innocent friends.
It is true; however, unfortunately, responsibility and innocence are concepts that we should judge properly since if we truly believe that we are innocent, not responsible for the violence currently happening in the world, we should take a closer look at what we are about to trigger through the way we consume.
Starting with the way our clothes are produced, all the way to the manner in which we eat, we have made the world sick. Every day our atmospheric pollution kills 115 people in France, the water pollution caused by our pesticides, our technology, our waste, our intensive breeding kills 9315 individuals daily in the world, exploiting some, killing others and acting like owners of a planet that doesn’t belong to us..
The fact that the world mobilized itself on the occasion of the attacks that took place in France touches and saddens me at the same time. I am touched that the world thinks about my country and prays for it, but also sad to know that this collective consciousness will only be short-lived, without real initiative, without any change in overall attitude, without anything changing actually. Tweeting, sharing a photo on Facebook takes roughly 1 minute, but changing one’s way of life requires real effort, compassion and motivation that few amongst us will have among all those who today display the national flag colors as a profile picture. So yes, to paraphrase Bono, Friday Bloody Friday, but actually Monday Bloody Monday, Tuesday Bloody Tuesday, and so on and so forth…
#Prayforparis but also #prayfortheworld and #prayforourchildren. And let’s act because it is through everybody’s acts that we may change everyone’s life. As Humans, we are capable of changing the world, if we want to, by being more involved and committed into acting for causes we want to defend, by changing the way we consume and by stopping hiding ourselves from the truth making the world problems and sickness are someone’s else problem. Our planet, our world, our choices.
The GreenPick ; a better future can be built, together.