The small difference: to act or to look away

Hundreds of Millions of people are watching on TV these days, how 22 men are scrapping over a ball. The event is called World Football Championship and is a huge money factory orchestrated by the media. With the half-finals at the latest, even those fall for it that usually don’t care about this ball game. Everybody watches.

At the same time, innocent civilians in Palestine are getting killed by bombs and rockets.  Innocent they are, because only very few support the provoking Hamas. The one, who looks a bit closer, quickly realizes: Palestinians are refugees in their own country. They are displaced people on grounds of UNO resolution no. 181; it decided establishing a state for the Jews and dividing Palestine, the mandated area of Great Britain. Tears are shed for lost chances in the football game, however not for human beings who are at the mercy of rockets pouring down on them. Nobody watches.

This is just one example.

What’s the use anyhow, if we look at it? Aren’t we tired of the perpetual same pictures of rockets hitting their targets, of the rising black smoke, of crumbling buildings and people streaming with blood? Don’t we know by heart the documentary reports about sick, malnourished children, desperate mothers and worn out fathers in the Sahelian zone? And what about the news about the competing gangs in slums around the globe, in which not a single police officer dares to step? What about the knowledge of radioactively contaminated regions? Why should we always look at it, inform us or even get involved?

We are well aware, that politics is a dirty business and that money talks. Why should we get upset? We anyway can’t do anything about it!

Isn’t it better to look away, not to get upset and just to lead a comfortable life with the usual ups and downs?  What’s the point? One just gets more glumly when looking at all that injustice all over the world!

As to silence your conscience, you can give some money to a charity, well knowing that the larger portion of the money disappears in advertising, trips and the pockets of some officials. It’s too big an effort to find a project that receives your full donation.

Yet in spite of that, there are those who call for protests and boycotts, collect signatures and address a petition. Courageously they try to change something in our obdurate, cosy world by stirring up and informing us. However, they get sneered at, rarely are they taken seriously.

Further on, there are those idealists that voluntarily go to the places of misery in order to distribute food, treat wounds and alleviate sufferings. They don’t close their eyes upon all the misery, they give all they have: their energy, their power and their health – and sometimes their lives.

Then, there are those who organize and write from the underground, and hence put their lives at risk.

Recently, I listened to a discussion about this topic and decided to let you know my belief: if everybody looks away and nobody listens, we hence become complicit. What was that about II. World War???

However, if every single person does his/her (even small) bit, gets committed and acts, it can make the small difference: eventually put more decent people to politics, no more selling of weapons to conflict areas, save people from starvation and misery…

Let’s be honest: it’s pure luck that we were born in Western Europe and not in Palestine, Syria, Somalia or anywhere else. The chance as the small difference – how unfair.

(posted on my German blog on 12 July 2014)