“Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is poverty. Ignorance is devastation. Ignorance is tragedy.” – Jim Rohn
When I saw that todays ‘Daily Prompt’ word was devastation, I thought I’d do a little experiment and Google it. I can’t say I was surprised to see hundreds, if not thousands of news articles with the word ‘devastation’ in the headline.
What did surprise me was the range of news that was being described as devastating. I was seeing articles about the crisis in Aleppo, and the recent avalanche in Italy alongside articles about The Great British Bakeoff leaving the BBC and The Washington Redskins losing to the New York Giants. Don’t get me wrong, I love Bakeoff just as much as the next British person, but how is its changing channels in anyway comparable to the deaths of over 31,000 people, at least 20,000 of them being civilians ? And that’s just in the city of Aleppo. Nearly half a million people have been killed during the Syrian Civil War, and 11 million have had to flee their homes and are in desperate need of food, shelter and clean drinking water. Whilst I was reading about the Syria Crisis, I realised that there’s so many other people suffering out there, some of which I’m ashamed to say I knew nothing about. Like I had no clue that 6.5 million people in Malawi are starving because of a drought last year. (Read more about both the Syria and Malawi crisis’ here).
It completely amazes me what constitutes as ‘news’ these days. Doesn’t it make you sad that we live in a society that would rather read news articles about whether the bum slip is the new side boob (I’m looking at you Daily Mail) than articles about what’s actually going on out in the world. I don’t claim to be innocent, I do spend a lot of my time reading trivial showbiz news, I want to know what the Kardashians are doing right now and I want to see pictures of Zayn Malik and Gigi Hadid being totally adorable. But I do still care about what is happening in the world, and think that we should be doing anything we can to help people that are suffering. And I certainly don’t think that the loss of a football game should be compared in ANY way to the the deaths of thousands of innocent people. I know that headlines are supposed to grab peoples attention, but you’d think that something like the Syrian Civil War and the loss of thousands of innocent lives would be at least slightly more news worthy that The Great British Bakeoff now having ad breaks.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think everyone should try to put things into perspective when they either read the news, or write about it. I know that it seems really trivial, but seeing these articles side by side as the top Google results just made me feel a little bit ill.
Until next time,
Aimee x
The Life of an Aspiring Writer 