The Global Village

In the Ray Bradbury short story The Meadow, there is a brilliant spiel about the smallness of the world. A character is walking around a film set, where different world cities back onto others on different soundstages – you walk through a door in one and pop out onto another. The character tries to explain to a man who wants to destroy them, that the whole thing is connected, thus:

 “… you got Boston joined to Trinidad … part of Trinidad poking out of Lisbon, part of Lisbon leaning on Alexandria, Alexandria tacked onto Shanghai, and a lot of little pegs and nails in between, like Chattanooga, Oshkosh, Oslo, Sweet Water, Soissons, Beirut, Bombay, and Port Arthur. You shoot a man in New York and he stumbles forward and drops dead in Athens. You take a political bribe in Chicago and somebody in London goes to jail. You hang a Negro man in Alabama and the people of Hungary have to bury him. The dead Jews of Poland clutter the streets of Sydney, Portland, and Tokyo. You push a knife into a man’s stomach in Berlin and it comes out the back of a farmer in Memphis.”

This week, my faith in humanity blossomed somewhat as, for a change, we stopped being American or British or Spanish or Italian or Libyan or Australian or Egyptian or Chilean. Like the people in that short story, we saw the world for the small place that it is, and realised that we have to look at the bigger picture and perhaps even if we cannot do anything about the problems in other countries, we at least can let them know that they are not forgotten, prove that we do care.

In New Zealand, one of the country’s worst earthquakes of modern times shook the ground, killing at least ninety-eight people. The USA and UK wasted little time in sending out search and rescue teams to help with finding survivors and beginning the clean-up operation, which will include working out what to do with the many destroyed buildings, including the beautiful Christchurch Cathedral.

Meanwhile, in northern Africa, things took a turn for the worse. In Tunisia, we cheered as the protestors won, and then again as after eighteen days and 350 dead, Egypt too managed to get rid of their tyrannical dictator. So Libya thought it would have a go.

In just two days, over 400 people were dead, shot with bullets so large they literally rip people apart. While the Western governments remained worryingly silent, the Internet came into its own. My usual haunts, in particular including Tumblr and, of course, Twitter, were full of outrage, of passing on important messages, of people refusing to keep quiet and spreading every last detail they found out.

Perhaps we’re doing nothing to help – indeed, I don’t know what help we can give to Libya – but there was something so wonderful about the whole thing. Like I said, we stopped looking at ourselves as being defined by our nations and looked at ourselves as humans. They suffered and we tried to feel their pain, although we would never be able to.

Recently, I’ve begun to feel that the world is crumbling down around my ears. All great empires end … perhaps the Human Empire, the global village, has finally begun to lose it.

The invention of the Internet is, I feel, mostly to “blame” for this feeling that we are part of something bigger. We can now connect to anyone else on the planet and these countries are closer now than they have ever been. Sadly, with every village comes village idiots, and our global village is no different.

I have seen messages of hate online, messages from people with no sympathy and no understanding and, I would presume from this, no education. One springs to mind of people who had left comments on a blog about the Australian flooding. They were Americans, telling the Australians to “get over it”, and that the threats of terrorism their country faced were far greater than the suffering of their (supposedly) allied country. Disgusting.

In some cases, the media, too, is full of village idiots. While people are being blown apart in Libya, there are some websites dedicating their time to Justin Bieber’s haircut. Do you get that? In the choice between dedicating their headlines to genocide or the fact that a teenager got a haircut, they’ve gone with that ever relevant topic: HAIR GROWS, THIS GUY HAS FOUND A WAY TO STOP IT!

In all of this, the politicians seem to remain idiotic too. I know there is nothing they can do personally to step in and stop Libyan military killing the civilians, or indeed stop earthquakes in New Zealand, but let’s look at the facts. They were quite happy to stumble into a war with Iraq when a dictator was ruling over there, but Tunisia? Libya? Egypt? Not a thing. In fact, these are supposedly some of our allies – our former colonies. Why did we not feel it appropriate to try and save these people?

Am I being cynical or is it because these people pose an actual threat? After all, have we seen any evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction yet, after all these years? Did that war not all begin around the same time that Osama bin Laden organised the 9/11 attacks? Let’s not forget that Saddam had nothing to do with that? Or is the whole thing, dare I say, about oil and resources? Iraq has a lot of oil, but Osama’s Pakistan does not, so what was the point of invading them? So is the same true of north Africa? Maybe Tunisia, Libya and Egypt had nothing for us to take, so we had nothing to gain from helping the oppressed people of these countries. (I’ve just done a bit of research for once – Libya does have oil, but Italy takes most of it, while the UK and USA don’t take much).

It seems hard to deny these days that every country appears to be facing breaking point, with the world’s economy in tatters and protests across the world every other week. Even factors beyond our control – earthquakes, hurricanes, floods – seem to be worsening, almost as if Mother Nature herself has had enough and wants us gone. We cannot be expected to help everyone all the time we keep viewing ourselves as different.

Those being killed in Libya, those suffering in New Zealand, those celebrating in Egypt and those clearing up after the floods in Australia. They are us. They are not some other species, they are humans like me and you and David Cameron and Barack Obama, and the world needs to start working together if it has any hope of getting out of the next century, let alone the next millennium, because the world is now so small that everything we do resonates in every corner of the globe.

The quotation I used to open this blog continues, and I shall use that continuation to end:

 “It’s all so close, so very close. That’s why we have peace here. We’re all so crowded that there has got to be peace, or nothing would be left! One fire would destroy all of us, no matter who started it, for what reason. So all of the people, the memories, whatever you will call them, that are here, have settled down, and this is their world, a good world, a fine world.”

Maybe we all need to think about that a little more and begin to work together, no matter how hard that might look for now. It is not an impossible dream. It is possible if we just learn a little respect.

The Big Society, Whatever It Is

Another failure of a week at the Jobcentre, and I was finally bumped up against one of those stories in the news that has never really been anything to do with me.

“Has anyone spoken to you about this?” said my ‘advisor’. He handed me a sheet of paper and I said wearily, “No. No one’s told me anything.”

“Well, this is part of a volunteering scheme that…”

I interrupted him. “Is this Cameron’s Big Society thing?”

“Er … yes.”

Effectively, what I’m being asked to do here is go off and offer my services to a library or a care home, but quite how I am supposed to live on the grand total of £0.00 a week for that, I fail to understand.

So, the Big Society! What is it?

Um, well, I’m not sure really. See, the thing is, none of us seem completely clear on what the Big Society involves. As far as I can tell, it is mostly about Cameron selling off the post offices, libraries, care homes and other public services to the public themselves. That way, the government no longer has to pay for them, or indeed deal with any complaints about how they are run.

But let’s be honest, are any of you going to have a whip round with me so we can buy a library? No, of course you aren’t. And even if you are, it is only because you have more money than sense, or at least have somehow found a job that requires little of you for a lot of money, so you can spend the rest of the time running the library. You can’t live off the wage of a volunteer.

Politicians. There are some people who get a lot of money for doing very little. We’re here facing one of the worst recessions in history and yet all of these politicians have somehow got the time to write newspaper columns, churn out books about economic collapse, make television appearances, go on endless holidays to sunnier climes and even appear on Strictly Come Dancing. Well, at least that last one wasn’t the Business Secretary or someone we need working all the time!

Oh, no, wait…

I really cannot understand the cuts and taxes the government are implementing to save the country, as everything they do just seems to be done from the wrong angle. It helps them, but not us, the people they are supposed to be helping.

Take tuition fees, for example. They’ve raised them now to a maximum of £9000 a year, and in the next breath, Cameron turned round and said he wanted more people from lower-income families to attend university. But why? Universities are already turning people away, so surely you don’t need any more people going, especially those who will struggle even more with the enormous debt behind them. Where is the logic in any of this?

I believe that politicians are going into the job for the wrong reasons, and the primary reason is – kerching – money! If they really cared about helping everyone, making a difference, doing good for the country and saving the economy, why don’t they all take, say, a fifty per cent pay cut? Maybe even seventy per cent. Or maybe they should be paid on what they actually achieve. Remove all their bonuses and expenses and they can live on a smaller wage.

Or if they are going to be paid such huge amounts, then they must be forced to attend parliament, since whenever you see Prime Minister’s Questions, there’s only ever about five of them in there. We should be able to hold them to account if they go against their word on something. Once they start helping us like they keep telling us they want to, then we might actually be some help as well. And standing on a podium and telling us that they understand the hardships is not good enough, because they don’t.

I know that no one knows how to run the world, but those in government seem to think they’ve got some idea, so it’s about time they proved it. And the Big Society is not the way forward.