So, home at a respectable hour on a Friday afternoon I trawl the net on an instantly beloved new laptop to find that really, I prefer life with my blinkers on.
I have managed to stay as far away from news on the Haitian crisis thanks to a home which runs without television, a selfish taste for news which is immediately relevant to Me and a husband who reads the highlights of international news to his sleepy wife late at night off an internet connection via his pda phone. Our experience of the news is almost always coloured with the lumenescent green ping of progress bars indicating the successful upload of our newly awaited favourite youtube advert, made in a country we’ve never visited for a product we’ll never see in our own.
The irony does not escape me, entirely.
Add to this the fact that two weeks ago I managed to drive into the garage, on one side of the house, at precisely the same time as my husband sat down on the bed with his set of house keys and alarm buttons in his back trouser pockets, on the other side of the house –resulting in the electric garage door closing slowly and very painfully onto the roof of the car I was parking and snapping the radio aerial. Leaving me radio-less on the way to work and completely isolated from any daily news breaking between 6:30 and 7:30am.
The bottom line is that my first interaction with the current international crisis was a Saturday morning 5FM countdown – soundtrack to what I’d like to call an aerobic workout but is just me dragging a confused broom across the kitchen floor – where Sheryl Crowe featured in a chart-topping Haitian Salvation Hymn and Madonna was praised for her financial contribution to the disaster fund.
Without the context to engender some kind of empathic response, all I thought was that Sheryl Crowe has indeed not had a hit for some time now and that jumping on some bandwagon is better than being left at the side of the road with mud on your shoes – and Madonna, well I thought she was hoping to be offered a bevy of Haitian babies for adoption post proffering a financial contribution that just about doubled the entire country of Haiti’s GDP for the last three years.
And then today, on my afternoon off, on the afternoon when I have three hours to enjoy not having to contemplate anything at all, The Mail and Guardian runs a side story accompanied by the most vivid images of children being rescued from the rubble of the Haitian devastation. 10 years ago those images would have been banned. Now, dying children are a side-story on a flashing five second banner in the middle of an international news agency’s website; because that’s what it takes to get my attention.
The irony does not escape me, entirely.
As it turns out, I couldn’t read the article. I was gutted by the flood of my sudden compassion and I didn’t like the way it felt.
There is always a way to turn an international crisis into a personal one.
-Soba
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