If you are of a maudlin cast, mental images
of the worlds’ waters and highways awash with the dead, dying and desperate of less
fortunate countries will morph into a damning indictment on the state of
humanity. If you then, even briefly, scan the internet for information you will
encounter safe, comfortably-off but vicious, spiritually bankrupt commentators
glorying in the miserable destruction of those other human beings. Maybe
because those ‘other’ people have different skin colour or culture and are not therefore
worthy of care or kindness or even a decent end.
Who can understand these on-line
parasites feeding mentally on the misery of strangers, publicly evacuating their
verbal bowels with no shame?
I find this online carnage almost as distressing as
the news stories of the thousands of hapless humans fleeing the daily anticipation
of a horrible death to take their chances with possible death lightened only by
very thin hope. The shameless posturing, the pride in lack of sympathy is evidence
of a paucity of compassion akin to that of the traffickers and it doesn't bode well for our future.
In the UK we’ve just been through a
self-congratulatory period following the centenary celebrations for WW1. Oddly
any records you manage to find taken directly from the mouths of ordinary
soldiers who actually struggled in the blood and the mud are anti-war.
Many admit to not knowing why they were fighting. At least it’s generally
agreed that Britain and its Allies were the good guys in the second Great War
which may be why it’s so endlessly popular with students of history. But I
listen to contemporary politicians and those wallowing in a bit of soggy jingoism and
worry that they try to immerse subsequent conflicts
in that same quagmire.
Ironically there appears to be a crossover between
many of the jingoists who glory in a past they never knew and those decrying
the fleeing and the fearful of today. It’s worth remembering that one of the
things Britain did that it can be proud of is - it took in refugees. Is it
different because these ones are brown and black or not Christian? Or is it
uncomfortable because we know some are fleeing an Apocalypse we detonated?
It’s hard to avoid the nameless nasties as they spew
their bile and acid in the comments columns next to the items you want to search
online. If you wait for the print press it can be days behind – ditto the radio and I
gave up on TV last century.
All I can think of to suggest is that the decent
people -
PLEASE MAKE MORE NOISE...