It’s funny how one minute you can be broadening your horizons, learning new things and gaining a new perspective on how the future might be. Then the next you’re just back to staring at a pc screen and wondering where the morning went.
This kind of hypnotic lull often reminds me of another form of mind-bending phenomena.
.
.
Hypnotism.
.
.
Never done it myself but I saw it at a pub once and it looks kinda freaky.
Are Nigerians secretly hypnotising themselves to search for more interesting ways to earn money? Have they finally broken free of the shackles of the West, or have they just been smoking too much opium?
I was speaking to a lecturer today about how easy we find it in the West to exploit Africa. Every day we make decisions in our lives which have a detrimental effect on people in another country. Most of the time we even know that there are alternatives but we choose not to follow them. Fair Trade products are available in most large supermarkets and yet they make up only a small percentage of sales. People see that they are Fair Trade, and just don’t bother. We have become so comfortable that we are almost blasé about other people. They are not around us, we can not see the suffering, they are not dieing on our doorstep and we do not have to watch them bury their babies. We spend money on fancy gadgets when that same money could help inoculate children against disease, we buy ‘luxury’ items while others go through a day with only a handful of rice.
Everyone does it, regardless of how much you may think you don’t. Think about all the money you have spent in the last month on ‘stuff’ that you don’t really need. Ever thought about giving that money to charity instead??
I’m not saying you are a bad person, just that we have, as a society, managed to shut out the parts of the world we don’t like the look of. We can happily ignore the plight of millions because we are OK. It’s not big, it’s not clever. It just is.
America has spent so much money fighting this war that they could have gone a long way towards helping out our fellow Africans. No, money is not the answer to Africa’s problems, but it would help.
People are the problem, Full Stop. And this really got me thinking.