What is wrong with us?
Among liberals in both the US and UK a regular
question seems to be
How
did we come to this?
It is a conundrum I pose myself.
How did the US and UK, two global powers that would
appear to have it all in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, sink so low?
And how come Washington and Westminster are now so bent on navel gazing self-destruction that Syria is going
almost unnoticed?
Syria is a conflict that has lasted almost as long as WWI and
WWII combined and is now creating the largest humanitarian disaster of this
century.
How did the pre-eminent power on the globe end up
run by a sociopathic, semi-literate, infantile, deluded narcissist and how did
the contemporary world’s first modern democracy end up run by a racist, elitist,
womanising, low-life liar?
One very broad answer to both seems to be that the
countries that had everything somehow managed to persuade those living there that they are victims. More importantly they are
victims not of the elites who cream off the profits and take more than their fair
share but they are victims of those at the bottom. Somehow. And the narrative
goes on. Now that the people spouting that poison have won high office they are
– as the Americans say – doubling down by overturning hard won rights of ordinary people. Both administrations
dish out tax cuts to the rich and ‘free up’ the rich from regulations that
might reduce their ability to make even more profit while harming the
environment and living conditions of those lower down.
Here in the UK, as the rich benefit and Boris
Johnson obsesses over more legacy projects for his glorious memory (we are considering building an unwanted, unnecessary
bridge from Scotland to Ireland over WWII munitions dumps) a drop in life
expectancy for poorer women has just been revealed and shames us.
MEANWHILE SYRIA.
In all this mess and ridiculous wasteful diversion,
we’ve managed to ignore one of the greatest human tragedies of modern times.
Since I last wrote about Syria things have worsened
significantly – from horrendous to unimaginable. (E.g. ref – posts 172 also 152
158…)
It is not (yet) the biggest disaster numerically in terms of
human deaths but the abomination of harrowing misery and the depths of human
suffering in Syria are happening in a world that we decided –post WWII - would
be civilised. After Hitler we said no more. We decided after Pol Pot we would
not allow this again. We agreed that monstrosities like those perpetrated by
Idi Amin and The Rwandan Genocide and the Kosovo ethnic cleansing would be no
more. This deliberate violence against the most vulnerable, the abandonment of
the innocent would not be part of the human story in the 21st
century. But it is. And no one with the power to change things cares.
This time the horror is barely making the news. We
have run out of compassion and decency. Our moral compass is pointing to HELL and
that is reflected in the current administrations of both Washington and
Westminster.