23 Oct Oops, i did it again

A facebook post from a dear friend says, “Everything is actually still getting better, so don’t believe the “hype”. :)” To which is linked an article from the Huffington Post, World Becoming Less Violent: Despite Global Conflict, Statistics Show Violence In Steady Decline.

I bit. I could have swam quietly by, minding my own business as i have been doing for the past few months. But i couldn’t resist.

It’s much cheaper to starve people to death than bomb them. It’s more profitable to make cosmetic medicines for the global north than vaccines for the global south. Violence? It is not just the war machine – physical violence – that kills. It is the silent violence of passively standing by, of smugly declaring peace. It is discursive, it is structural, it is ideological, it is political.

To which i received these two replies:

All that being the case, good news is still good news. American rape being down 80 percent since 1973? Good news. Murder in Europe is 1% what it was a few hundred years ago. Good news.

Its not passive or smug or ignorant to celebrate good news, and it doesn’t insinuate losing sight of the world’s problems. In fact, only focusing on the problem can also be counter-productive.

i couldn’t resist…i responded again.

It’s about staying focused on compassion. 22,000 children die each day from poverty-related disease and starvation. Rape is down in America, and up in war-torn countries – in fact, is used as a weapon of war in places as distinct as Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly a third of children in the world are undernourished. Less than one percent of what is spent on weapons each year could put every child in school. One million people die from malaria each year.“Everything” is not actually getting better. Things are only getting better for “us” – those of us with the luxury to live in the global north, in a country that spends more on military and weapons than all the rest of the world combined. The country that represents only 4.6% of the world’s population but 33% of the world’s consumption.

Yes, good for us for not killing and raping each other – now what are we going to do about all the killing and raping our country does in other parts of the world?