I didn’t stop blogging per se, it simply seemed irrelevant for a while, and maybe it still does.
Blogs are, essentially, rantings. At least this one is. Things that irritate or amuse me about my day/life/world end up featuring here in various and multiple paragraphs. If i’m feeling like it I may link to interesting stories. Or the best letter in today’s Irish Times. But in the last few weeks it hasn’t seemed worth it - perhaps that is the worst way of all to deal with the world we live in.
When something like the current “Lebanon Crisis” occurs, it’s very difficult to contextualise it within your own life, and your own life experience, especially when you have been exceptionally lucky and grown up on another planet - a planet where you never wonder where the next meal is coming from or whether you will live through the night. In that same context, arriving online to complain about a group of ignorant spanish students who made the bus journey home more unpleasant than usual seems all the more pathetic. Because really, what does it matter?
These are the days that should make us humble. Appreciative even. The ease with which we live our lives should mean that we embrace our freedoms rather than questioning their means. For weeks now a group of people who have lived in the shadow of death their whole lives have been dragged into its spotlight. And so here I am, wondering why people who have all the chances and opportunities in the world, see fit to treat each other with disrespect and contempt for no better reason than that they are in a hurry to go home and watch Big Brother.
The same circumstances that make our complaints meaningless should in turn give our lives meaning. We are blessed with each other and yet we take that simple fact for granted. We value wealth, ‘beauty’, possessions, when in fact the most valuable prize of all is that which we already have - that which so many others may never have.
It’s all very well to take a side, to have a view, to self-righteously declare who is right and who is wrong in any conflict like those killing people as I type - not just in Lebanon or Iraq but much further afield, largely in countries not quite as rich in natural resources and thus ignored because it is more comfortable for us (’the West’??) to do so. It simply occurs to me that there may be very little point.
It’s not a case of apathy - and I am loathe to use that word as it is one of my least favourite in any language - it is a case of feeling that one person, or even a million people, ranting online in their individual “constituencies” of webby-land isn’t going to stop the children that are living today being dead by tomorrow. Those who get to make those decisions, and those who get to influence those decisions, aren’t paying attention, because they don’t care. Surely they can’t care. If they did, wouldn’t they do something about it?
