Exasperation: A Rant

I’ve held off on writing this because I wanted to wait for some of my anger to die down. It probably didn’t work.

Scenario: Watching the Saturday evening news, most of the way through and there’s a story on an explosion on an oil pipeline in Nigeria. 200 people killed. Cuts to a man who has had to stop fishing bodies out of the lake, because the water is starting to boil. He says that he doesn’t want to talk because if he talks he can’t cry, and there are too many people dead for him not to cry. This is the most emotionally impacting thing that I’ve seen on the news since the anger and desperation of the forgotten in New Orleans.

And as the news item is finishing, I’m sitting there expecting them to conclude with a comment on how long it will take this area to recover from such a loss, or how desperate these people must have been to be syphoning oil from a leak in a pipeline, or even just about the sheer devastation of 200 lives lost in such a huge disaster. I was a little too optimistic.

“Concerns that the explosion might result in a rise in world oil prices were allayed when the blah blah blah…..”

I lost it. I don’t normally break into tears of anger, but I couldn’t believe that the media in this country could actually make that kind of statement in response to such an overwhelming human tragedy. Who gives a shit if 200 Africans die, but I’d better not have to pay another 2 bucks for my petrol or there’ll be hell to pay. What a pathetic excuse for a society. Even now I can’t start talking about it without being overwhelmed with disappointment and shame at the way this nation approaches these lives. 200 people.

The fact of the matter is, we live in a blatantly racist society. We really do believe that white people’s lives are more important than those of black people. We somehow still believe that it doesn’t mean jack to have Africans dying every day, at least not compared to my need for tax relief/childcare places/a war on terror/so on. IT IS SICK! This is a seriously ill society. When the federal budget came out I scoured for information on Foreign Aid. After all – having just come off the Make Poverty History campaign, surely our government, and our media, would be willing to spare some column space to address having some semblance of care about people outside our borders. Nothing.

Australian society is eating itself. We are all so obsessed with our own mortgages, our own lifestyle, maintaining “our way of life”, that we’ve forgotten that others even exist. And the problem isn’t just our media, or our politicians. They are both puppets of public opinion. The problem is that Australians are utterly and completely self-absorbed, and self-interested.

“6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about Justice and Equality.

Because there’s no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa and, if we’re honest, conclude that deep down, we really accept that Africans are equal to us. Anywhere else in the world, we wouldn’t accept it. Look at what happened in South East Asia with the Tsunami. 150, 000 lives lost to that misnomer of all misnomers, “mother nature”. In Africa, 150,000 lives are lost every month. A tsunami every month. And it’s a completely avoidable catastrophe.

It’s annoying but justice and equality are mates. Aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.”

- Bono at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, 2 February 2006

Edit: If you haven’t heard anything about this (because despite 200 people dying – there’s been virtually no mention) there’s an article here which at least has the decency not to discuss the impact on world oil prices. (BBC World News)