It doesn’t take much to figure out that starving to death is not quite the same as being shelled while sitting in bed reading a comic book, nor is it even remotely confusing as being randomly smashed with a sledgehammer while shopping at your local grocery. Clearly, starving to death could never be as wicked as having a tyre fall on your head while walking in an open field nor is it even as vaguely outlandish as being attacked by your goldfish in the bath tub. Starvation is a process; you don’t just wake up one morning and decide to starve to death that afternoon.
We are in a position today where we could reinvent the wheel to talk, break-dance and even breastfeed our children, but we will not find the necessary means to ensure that no human on this planet goes to sleep crying from an empty stomach. Wars are mostly pointless and are usually perverted demonstrations of power and they aren’t likely to end, until of course our thirst to destroy is met with self-destruction or we simply find some other past time.
But allowing mass starvation to continue on a daily basis surely cannot be in our genes.
Or is it?
When I was little (just over a year ago) my father would remind me at the supper table to eat up every morsel or face the consequences. It was a needless reminder because I only had to be told once that if l didn’t finish my food — God himself — on the Day of Judgement (or the day after depending on the end of the world programme), would command me, and all other deviant, delinquent brats to pick up every bit of food we’d ever wasted on earth, with just our eyes.
While eating a rice dish — since the metaphor didn’t quite work while devouring a Wimpy cheese burger — my mind would drift. I’d imagine fire and brimstone falling out of the sky, puddles of hot lava strewn across the path to heaven, and I’d be deliberating how in the name of the good shepherd would I ever be able pick up rice with my eyes, without my hands or a spoon and crucially, without crying.
“Stop playing with your food,” my mum would scream as I gazed dreamily at my curry and rice turning into little munchkins urging me to follow the grains on the turmeric glazed road towards the Wizard.
The problem was that while I religiously followed my father’s “your eyes will be bench pressing rice grains in hell ma boy” warning, I honestly thought by gobbling all my food up, I was doing my bit for the starving boy in Ethiopia or in Somalia (as the news always suggested). In fact, it was only after puberty (last week) I realised that whether I saved some food, ate the food, sat on the food, made castles on the table with the food (I am positive you get my point), this imaginary little kid whether in Addis Ababa or Darfur or wherever, wouldn’t reap the benefit of my solidarity or the malice of my disrespect to his hunger (depending on whatever happened on the table of course). In fact, my father’s little funny allegory, I should have realised, coming from a Big Bang enthusiast rather than a mullah from Kandahar, was meant to catalyse a deeper sense of engagement and regard for those without food, those in abject poverty, rather than serving merely as a hint on how to make it past St Peter one day.
Of course I was young, stupid and chose to be entertained instead.
Don’t narrow your eyes and feign confusion. You also chose to be entertained.
I am not talking about dancing girls in the royal harem of Marrakech or in the lowly streets of Bangkok. I am not talking about sipping latte’s in some eccentric street corner or making smoothies in modern Russell Hobbs smoothie makers or any other memento of modern luxury.
I am talking about our refusal to become outraged, show solidarity, become ungovernable and stand up for a cause that didn’t seek to entertain us, first.
Every time a country was invaded or a huge bomb took out a train station or a monstrous earthquake literally opened the earth we all chose to be entertained by the drama of it, allowing the dramatic plunges and 24-hour news to tickle and arouse us before doing anything worthwhile about it.
We swap stories on “where we were when it happened”; we’d curse American imperialism (even if it was a tsunami in Indonesia). We would pass on the multiple conspiracy theories in text messages and email. The Muslims meanwhile will scream victimisation and burn an embassy, the Jews will bring up the Holocaust and the Pope will forgive molesters and ban abortion for the hundredth time. Then the US will invade somebody and the impotent Europeans will go along for the ride.
For just a moment, we would contemplate “how dangerous and vulnerable the world really is”.
But as long as we are unaffected personally, meaning we don’t lose a family member, a friend or our poodle, the drama is intriguing, even frightening from a Hollywood kind of perspective. Of course we soon realise we need to get to bed since we had work the next day. In fact, the drama reminds us why we must work the next day.
But the starving-to-death people; those who didn’t have a window fall on their heads while shepherding their cattle on a mountain top or weren’t bombed while looking for water in the desert — what about their boring plight?
“So what if people are starving every day? Can’t they grow something or eat a twig or if they really desperate: their own left hand? Why do they have so many children anyway? Why were they even born? A Donation? Was there a drought? And where is that damn explosion?”
Now if all of those 16 000 children who died every day due to malnutrition only moaned a little louder, let out a violent shrill or began to eat trees, then perhaps hunger could be more entertaining. Likewise, if those 950 million people across the globe decided to perform handstands before dinner, or played terrorist with their children and posted the video on Al Jazeera or really started eating their own hands then maybe, just maybe it might be worth doing more than eating all our rice. Until then, you can do the dishes.
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