To pimp a tragedy
To write something which emanates apathy while being emphatically concerned is quite challenging.
If one unlocks her/his phone and scrolls through any news aggregator, the good chances are that tragedy will be the most common topic present.
There are multiple problems the world is facing right now, and global extinction cases are being even more imminent. Ice caps melting, water level rising, heat waves scorching, forests getting razed, etc.
The Amazon case is a curious one. The furor concerning the media was involved with how they were not reporting the news about the fire, instead of, the fire itself. For a long period of consecutive days, Reddit and other such websites were lynching news agencies for not broadcasting the Amazon fires thoroughly. One quick search would have shown that the articles were already present. They just didn’t have enough hits.
What went wrong then? If information is the most powerful thing in the world, and the news is the source of information, why was this crucial event not in our collective hive-minds? Why did it take to accusing the media to get people aware of things going around?
Let’s play the blame game.
One gets bad news all the time. Tired and sick of it, one starts, albeit consciously or unconsciously, filtering the bad stuff out. Not interested in clicking on such depressing things anymore. The piece does not get views. The editor pushes that content backward. The people cry foul. They want this content on front. Then tragedies are posted again and again to get more clicks. Now go back to the first sentence of this paragraph again.
The news about the Amazon fires was already there. It just took a little bit of accusing to wake up the little amount of care the world has for its problems. Perhaps making people aware of issues can only get you a sigh with a cynical comment about how the world is like that.
It becomes a responsibility for all the parties involved in this scenario to fact check, not give in to sensationalism, and have proper clarity about information which is limpid instead of excited. This is too much work for a person who is above the age of fifteen and has problems piled upon problems. Gordian knots cannot be solved and untangled simply by outrage and protests. Tangible results are a product of conscious, continuous and sometimes collaborative efforts. Just persuading people that an issue exists seems inefficacious and pointless.
Then why spread awareness? What is the point of it? Letting people know this happens? And then? Cancer disappears? Poverty goes out with a bang? Fascism gets kicked in the nuts?
No. None of these will happen.
What skeptics and scoffers don’t realize is that awareness is not created for people to care about something, but for people who would care to know about it.
Could our issues be made more relevant by not letting anyone know about them? Conspiracy fuels the mind and outrage shakes the soul. So let’s hide issues and allow sleuths to get to the bottom of it. Unveil the shocking secret which will lead people to blame institutions for not paying attention and then raise their voice. But that’s not how it works and is an absurd proposition. Quick information to work upon something is imperative. Otherwise it will be too late.
Why people still don’t care even after knowing about the issues is something to be discussed later and a mystery not in the scope of this piece.
So what happens? Either let people know about all the mishaps in the world and see them grow cold and indifferent to all of it? Or focus on one topic at a time and let other major issues be suffocated till it’s their time to be investigated?
There will always be a camp which states that creating awareness doesn’t matter; something substantial and concrete should be done to get out of it. People who share stuff about awareness are shallow and don't do real work towards it. That might be true.
But a person by her/himself helpless. If that is the least thing one can do, we share a common empathy. This is what we need a bit of right now when there are problems which get darker over the time and horizon. All of it boils down to one idea.
Pick a cause. And stick to it.
