Piwin -> RE: Divisive ignorance (Nov. 13 2016 13:35:40)
|
quote:
It is indeed, but probably no more so than any other country with an ethnic and racial mix Towards the beginning of this year, the "Asian community" in Paris organized a march to demand more safety in their neighborhoods. More specifically, they wanted more cops and, contrary to what the majority opinion in France wants, they wanted more CCTV in the street. They felt there were increasing safety concerns for them, as some stereotype would have it that Asians walk around with a lot of cash. Muggings and assaults of Asian people by primarly Blacks and Arabs had been on the rise for quite a while. It came as a surprise since anti-Asian racism had barely been taken seriously before and they had not been the most vocal community in complaining about it, to say the least. The didn't call on any civil rights or anti-racism organizations as they felt those had never represented them, and organized everything themselves. I once spent the entire month of Ramadan in Casablanca. In the few places that do sell alcohol, they stop selling it about a week before Ramadan begins. The local Acima (chain of grocery stores) locked down the alcohol aisle with heavy metal gates. If you were white, however, they'd pull the gate up just enough so you could crawl under it, take whatever alcohol you wanted and bring it back to the register. My local friends sent me a few times to run those errands, since they would never have let them buy alcohol during Ramadan. In other words, Moroccan society as a whole seems to consider that Islam is a race, that if you are Arab, you must be Muslim and if you are white, you must not be. I think the US has good reasons to be proud of what they have achieved in terms of rolling back racism. That is not to say, of course, that isn't still a lot to be done to improve even further. @estabanana Thanks for sharing that. Seems like he was a hell of a man. I can help but feel that we're not all equal in terms of resolve, be it because of genetics or otherwise. And I'm not sure one can or should expect people to be that strong. The way I see it, is that liberal democracies exist precisely for that reason, to make sure that it's not just survival of the fittest and those who for whatever reason can't do it still have a chance. That doesn't preclude there being a number of people who could do it but are just too lazy and find it easier to sit on their asses. I guess a lot of the Conservative/Liberal divide surrounding the issue of poverty is pretty much based on whether you consider people can do it on their own or can't. I think some can, and some can't and I honestly have no idea how to tell the difference. Reading through his story, I honestly think I would have dropped the ball at some point. I'd like to think I wouldn't have, but if I'm honest with myself I probably would have. I've gone through more hardship than most people in my surrounding but it's hard to gauge how much one could fight through unless you're actually put in that situation. Another issue could be simply that of the narrative or sense of purpose that people have (or don't have). I suspect there are more and more people in the US for whom the American dream is unattainable, and even more for whom the American dream simply isn't a dream at all, as people struggle to make sense of the rampant materialistic values in society. A Cameroonian friend of mine, who fought as a teenager during the Biafra wars, once asked me about the mass shootings in schools in the US. I forget which one it was at the time, but one had just gone down a few days earlier. I remember telling him that, aside from sheer mental illness, I thought that people in the US increasingly felt a lack of purpose, that that was a least part of it. He looked at me and said "I don't understand. They have everything." As for "helicopter journalism", not to defend the man in question but I will say this. I've been fortunate to know quite a few journalists and especially photojournalists, but mainly those who specialize in war and conflict. They all complain about helicopter journalism, about those who get dropped in a nice hotel in the green zone and barely come out. But they're not so much complaining about their colleagues that do it than they are about the economic reasons that have led to this. There simply isn't money anymore in their industry to finance long duration work. The days when they could be sent by a major newspaper for months or a full year to cover a given topic in a given location are over. Those who do so do it on their own dime and they rely heavily on the good will of a few patrons and on the odd journalism or photography prize they might win here or there. I remember one panel session during a festival where one photographer talked about how he had covered the war in Afghanistan. He said that he knew it was helicopter journalism, but he didn't know how to do otherwise, that he also had a life at home and couldn't just abandon everything to cover the news so he accepted that the work he was doing was partial at best, that in that setting he had also stopped caring, that he looked at the world through his camera as if it were a movie and then just forgot about it once he got home. Some people in the audience started to boo him. His colleague, a reknown war photographer who has invested his whole life in his trade and has lost almost everything else because of it, family (his wife told him that if he couldn't leave "his camera" at the door when he came back home, then he shouldn't even bother walking in), health (malaria, hep C and several types of heavy metal poisining all due to his work) and money (I've heard of some cases where they would just sleep in the news offices between assignments because they had no money for anything else), got angry at the audience. He said that he bet there were maybe 10 people in the entire room who had a paid subscription to a newspaper. He said that if we expected them to sacrifice their lives and all of their own money to report the news and in no way supported them, then we we're just bunch oh a**holes. He said that he had done just that and that he despised people who saw him as a hero for it, because he shouldn't have had to do it, that his colleague had it right. If the readers don't care enough to pay so that they could cover the news properly, then why should they care about going the extra mile. I don't know how that maps on to domestic journalism but I do believe that behind this phenomenon of helicopter journalism there is more than just "bad journalists". There is the systemic issue of a dying industry that has failed to find new sources of funding when the readership decided that the news wasn't important enough to pay for. Younger generations are now praising the merits on the new online media, which is "free". Of what I've seen of it, online media is just commentary, and derivative commentary at that since a lot of it his based on what the traditional media are saying. Nobody seems to care anymore about the validity of the facts they are commenting on. Apparently commenting is enough.
|
|
|
|