Should I stop caring about what's going on in the world? Sometimes it's tempting to just bury my head in the sand given the desperate state of affairs we increasingly find ourselves in. When my parents used to regurgitate the bile from the right wing media (The Daily Mail being their favourite source of propaganda) I would become incensed with them and their lazy thinking. Why couldn't they see immorality and self serving nature of the conservative perspective? Where were the values they otherwise demonstrated in life. Where had their otherwise present compassion and kindness gone? How could they be so easily tempted into a racist, homophobic views that actually went against their own experience?
My dad's gone now but mum still reads it and her addiction to it's hatred damages her life. I was visiting last year when she shared one of her fears, 'Truro is full people speaking foreign languages now, it's terrible' I ask why that is a bad thing? Cornwall desperately needs tourism after all and people who want to work to stimulate some sort of economy down there. They're just people. She responds with, 'Well it's all these migrant rapists they're letting into the country now. There's no room, where are they all going to live?.'
I am aghast. What rapists Mum? When did this happen? Where is full? (Ironic given that Cornwall can't pay people to move there.) Well, it's all over the news, comes the reply. What news? I haven't seen it. What did it say?
She goes a bit quiet, then in a further dismissive huff. 'Well I don't want to talk about politics'. Ooops. I guess maybe you shouldn't have then. She knows at some level she's been lied to but I think feels guilty and conflicted for allowing herself to succumb to the manipulation of Paul Dacre and Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, the people responsible for the Daily Mail and it's corrosive effect.
The most distressing thing for me to witness is the inner conflict and distress it creates inside her, how her innate anxieties and lack of first hand experience are being hijacked and turned into righteous hatred. Fear is the hook that grabs her attention, then her ignorance is exploited as lie after lie pours from the page alongside open invitations to hate. The articles just need to imply that something terrible is happening (it usually isn't) and the poor reader is the victim of all of this (they usually aren't), then they point at the people who must be surely responsible (the nonconformists, the artists, the LGBT community, the brown people, the single mothers, the 'benefits scroungers', and of course the current favourite, the muslims!). Every day more of this poison drip feeds into her system. She thinks the Green Party are looneys. I don't see how anyone could ever come to that opinion under their own steam.
In psychological terms it looks like a drama triangle (a dynamic where victim, rescuer and persecutor are represented by complementary corners of a triangle), where the reader is put in the victim corner, the Mail plays rescuer and points to the other corner for whoever they have decided is the latest persecutor. An old game but seemingly effective. She even voted for Brexit because she wanted us to return to how it used to be. Manipulating peoples sense of nostalgia is currently favoured by far right parties across Europe and of course UKIP. They tell you to fear change, when... change is the only thing that is constant and unavoidable. It's a nonsense when you think about it.
The problem is, the older I get, the more I learn about what's happening in the world, the more I see it in action, the more I understand the monolithic nature of corporate control, the more I see the actual power concentrated in such a tiny place and being abused, the more impotent I feel. So I sit in this ever present dilemma, do I just give up and ignore it because it's easier, at lot of my friends seem to coast along in their own little bubbles. It's tempting sometimes, run away to New Zealand or Canada, hide somewhere, try and live life seperated from it all in a place where my values aren't being assaulted on an minute by minute basis. But that sounds like a kind of death. Or... do I continue to do what I do in my own small way by reposting articles on Facebook, being that irritant that points at our collusion and evidence of abuse of power.
Today I actually did something more about it and it soothes my angst somewhat. I gave some money to Stop Funding Hate, a movement that is trying to change things in an innovative way by targeting the advertisers that keep hatemongers like the Mail, Express and Sun in business. It was only a small amount, the price of a quiet night in the pub, but I got some of my virility back as a consequence and I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I recommend it.
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