Okay. i have some thoughts to share, even if the AC blog is, for all intents and purposes, as dead as Britney Spears' acting career (yes?) I, for one, would be brought immeasurable joy by seeing a new active collective blog post, even if I only happened to come across it months later. So you better be partying down right now.
Anyway. My topic. What I'm writing about? um. first, a confession. Sometimes, when we used to discuss issues in the AC, I simply didn't care; i enjoyed taking sides and winning arguments and showing everyone i had clever, informed opinions, but for the most part, i was rarely riled up enough (and far too lazy) to even consider doing something about it. I doubt this is very surprising to you, yet, i think this is one of the most pervasive issues within the (now defunct? oh no, i don't know if I can still talk about the AC as a current, functioning body or whether this should be in past tense>? say it isn't so!) active collective, and, indeed, with how we go about (went about!!??!!) our primary function - to raise awareness and concern for all sorts of political, economic and social issues globally. We (though i would like to exclude a few notable people from this generalisation - you know who you are- and am in no way bagging the active collective) quite simply didn't always care enough about the people and issues we were talking about, and as a result, found that our effectiveness was inhibited.
Right now, you might not be agreeing with me (Heck, I don't even know if i;m agreeing with me - i counted on figuring this out as i went along), but bear with me, please. i think i have a point to make that you may agree with. So so far we have established that I don't care, some of you might not care, and I'm willing to bet a whole lot more people out in the wider world do not care. Why? Now this isn;t amazing and it isn;t revolutionary and this too will not suprise you, btu the point of this post is too point out, to me at least, the most obvious fundamental flaw int he way we (I) approach the world. We (I) do not care because I have zero understanding, zero empathy, zero knowledge fo people outside of my situation. I'm not saying that we all have to walk a google miles in someone elses shoes; indeed, the only shoes you can walk in without squashing your toes and eventually falling over in a ridiculously comic way are your own. What I'm saying is that if we have to find a way to care so that we can do something, and if the way you care about someone is you get to know them, then we all need to do a heck of a lot more getting to know people in slippers and Geta* and those without shoes at all, as opposed to just the worlds of people in roman sandals and skate shoes. We need to know about these people to care about them - I for instance, would be much more concerned about the petrol station next to lily's house blowing up (actually in hindsight i think i would have a really proper freakout concern for this, how far do petrol station explosions reach? enough that if lily's family was at home they would be hurt? lily, i think it's just safer for you to never return home until that home is not situated, like, right next to an inflammable service station of death), or even the petrol station near, say, chris nelson's house, someone i only really tangentially know, than the numerous explosions going on with the express intent to hurt many people all over the world every day. As horrible as this is(and hopefully some other people to decrease how much of a bad perosn I am) because I don't have any idea who those people are, I feel close to zero responsibility to care, which is not right at all because we are a global, connected community - as john donne said, no man (or woman) is an island.
(*oh this has led me on a world of shoe adventure. did you know, for instance that the Patten was this like, shoe add-on in the middle ages that was like, a kind of stilt/mud version of the snowshoe? the more you know...)
But I;ve been talking about knowledge and for most of you, you have knowledge. you support fair trade because otherwise people get screwed over and you know, at least, that lots and lots of things in the worlds suck, so then why is hasn't this blog post ended and why atre you still reaifng me (okay, i have to say that i have been going round in circles because I forgot my point and it is 3 int he morning shit 3 in the morning I am going to collect myself and sail on tjhrough). I think the problem is though, that we think we know heaps because we know more than say, some of our classmates, when the reality is, we don;t know nearly enough at all. and I'm not saying you have to know everything and everyone and care for everyone because that is impossible btu what i am trying to say is that we need to know more people and care about more people and communities and be more aware of what life is like in for people with all different kinds of shoes. we need to find ways of caring and in part this is what i realised things liek the world vision ads (which i have "opinions" on) are trying to do - make people feel smethign, and then connect them with someone else in some part of the world entirely remote from their understanding but the problem with world vision is that that is all it encourages people to do, effectively letting everybody well off enough to to assuage their guilt while expanding their base of knowledge of other people and situations and perspectives very little.
and that is what this is essentially about - perspective. how we view others and ourselves in relationship to those others and whether we view ourselves in relation to them at all. Chimamanda Adichie gave this talk
where she encouraged people to look beyond the "single story" that they were being told about, mainly people other than them. She argues, basically, that telling a single story, even for altruistic purposes, such as charity to help a family because they are poor, or of all of the sucky things happening all over Africa in an effort to get people to help and care reduces them to that single element, eliminating your ability to see them as another person with a multi-faceted life just like yours or mines and instead as only that story told of them. It is stereotyping in its worst form, and the reason it is in this blog post at all is because the single story effect affects (i hope i got those right) a persons ability to care. Repeatedly being shown images of malnourished, unidentifiable African children, instead of inducing concern and horror eventually dehumanises those being shown, and desensitises those viewing the images and everyone loses. you are nto going to care or help someone you have no empathy for and you can't gain empathy until you see people who need help as being more than that and oh god, i am forgetting my point, and to do that, we have to look beyond the single story.
I think that needs to be the mission of each and every one of us. Not every person ont he continent of Africa is poor, illiterate, dying of aids and starving; not everyone in mexico is desperately trying to get into the USA (and actually, i just saw a marcel theroux documentary? on americans who move to Mexico to gain subsidised healthcare) and not every teenager is glued to their phone and ignorant of world happenings. We have to care, we have to know, we have to know about more than one side of the story. When Elsie refused to support the guy who lost out to ahmadinejad in the iranian elections, while i believe she was partly just trying to be contrary, she was also acknowledging that it wasn't a black and white issue - there were people who liked ahmadinejad and people who weren't about to protest and while they were perhaps not the people who needed sticking up for, they were people too? um. this was going somewhere. and we are lucky that we live in an age where we can look at twitter feeds in an entirely different language from an entirely different part of the world because no person is ever an island except sometimes it seems we are doing our darnedest for never leave our own little archipelago oh god, what point have I made? we need to care, we need to knowledge to care, we need to understand that our current knowledge of people and situations is not even close to being adequate, because we are all being fed stories from one perspective, and most of all, we can do something about it. yes. read more, talk more, research some for an ac blog post debunking conventional perspectives on people and situations, and most of all, figure out how to utilise things like the internet to do these things, to gain a greater understanding of the world because right now in time, we are connected like never before. what we choose to do with this power, is up to you.
i hope that all made sense. i'[m not quite sure idf it does in my brain so you might need to prepare for some heavy editing of this post. um. dont judge me for a post that instead of being groundbreaking rested the obvious. i restated it because it needs to eb restated. too often we dont take the time to think beyond the representationwe are given oh god
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