I hesitated writing since a couple of days cause I was lost in complexity concerning a question which is difficult to clarify.
It’s about how protest here and today could look like and why it’s not happening. It’s about how we’ve been raised to believe a lie, and we’re stuck on repeat no matter how obviously it comes knocking. It’s about surfaces and images, which are compelling but leaving us behind lonely, empty and destructive. It’s about how things in this world and with us are severely wrong but circling around ourselves makes us believe that we are too dizzy to think and too helpless to act.
It’s about how more than a decade ago people already realized that in these times we can not only look around here to detect what’s going wrong there. We need to think globalized and understand that our actions have an effect, even the tiniest, in good as in bad. We have to start listening and stop ignoring.
A few days ago I have been asked for the second time in six months to be in a campaign of two different multi-billion dollar corporations to whitewash their dirty production flows. The justifications, the double standards and the self-deceptions I have heard from myself and my surrounding were astonishing and exemplary for our laziness to look beyond surfaces and let multi-million euro marketing budgets fool us from our empathy and human intellect. I have refused to put my name and my face to do so and I have been cherished with admiration. But this is no courage, this is not extra-ordinary, this only reflects how easy we’re willing to compromise our basic moral integrity with some dirty money privileges, satisfying our endless narcism and ignorance. This is no sacrifice and no action. It’s simply reacting because we do know and we need to take serious what we proclaim. We have to fill up words like equality, democracy, Human rights with value again and fight for them, against the misuse to cover up scam. We need more empathy and clarity than ever to start connecting with what seems to not concern us.
Putting it in Charlie’s words:
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in; machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.
Our knowledge has made us cynical,
our cleverness hard and unkind.
We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery we need humanity,
more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life will be violent and all will be lost. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.