I admit, I can be a bit of a wimp, but I reckon only the exceptionally stoic amongst us would have watched the recent coverage of the terror attack in Kenya without flinching. Me, I had to fight back tears on more than one occasion and you know what, I’m okay with that, because this sort of thing should upset us.
Now it’s not that I want us to be upset, of course not, but I for one don’t think I will ever comprehend how people can be so cruel to each other. What drives teenagers to gun down innocent people in a shopping centre, a mother to starve her four-year-old son to death, and gangs of men to commit violent sexual offences? Clearly in some cases one could argue religion and politics but even then, I just don’t get it. How can any good come from inflicting pain and suffering?
I think in part the problem is that in a hyper-connected, increasingly virtual, world, we have forgotten how to connect with each other as people. We walk around with our heads U-turned into smartphones so that we can tweet, email, and Facebook. We watch reality TV and play lifelike video games. We use hashtags for emphasis and emoticons for sentiment, and when we visit a new country, we spend so much time behind a camera lens Instagramming our dinner and applying filters to our photos of the locals, that we forget to experience the moments and the people in them.
We see stuff on the news, lots of stuff, from all over the world, so much stuff that looks a bit like reality TV and a bit like video games and a bit like Instagram that it all sort of blends into a big hazy mass of stuff…stuff that’s real, but not so much to me. Until someone gets the balance wrong and forgets that it’s the school fair that’s real, not the weapons of mass destruction.
I appreciate that I am simplifying a very complex problem, and without a beauty queen crown on my head I feel ill-equipped to offer any real advice on securing world peace, but I do think that reconnecting with people and with community has to be a good starting point in the reclamation of humanity. It may be ‘easy’ to fire a gun at the anonymous, but surely not quite as easy if you’ve celebrated a shared football team’s win at your local pub with Mr Anonymous? And certainly child abuse can’t be quite as easy to get away with when people feel empowered by a sense of community to ask questions when in a first-world city, a four-year-old is seen scavenging through a bin?
As I say, world peace is not entirely within my gift, but connecting with the people in my community is. It’s why over the past few weeks I have made one very small but very conscious change to my daily routine; I have made it a rule to always smile, greet and make eye contact with bus drivers. My logic is simple: we’re all human, we all want to be noticed. A smile and a moment of eye contact may not seem like much, but they say something important. They say “I see you, you’re real and you matter.” And once you have that, you chip away at anonymity, reinstate humanity and open up the possibility of community.
It’s a small thing, but then maybe it’s the small things that matter.
