If you care that someone somewhere is suffering needlessly, then how can
you live in peace? How can there be peace when the very system of society
we live under is at war against so many human needs? What brutalities have
to be committed under our noses before we pause to think, "Why should
these brutalities not be stopped?" What brutalities must be committed
against our own human consciousness for us not to even care?
How damaged are they who hear the screams of starving children and watch
the self-torment of the mother with too little money in her purse and see
the old couple hobbling for miles because they can't afford transport and
say, "This is nothing to do with me � I don't care."
Christians like to think they have the monopoly upon caring. They weep and
they pray for you and then they go on supporting the very system which
creates all this mess. They leave big things like systems to god. They
pray into the sky and they prey on the hopelessness of millions who fall
into their arms, exhausted, confused, uncared for. And then the millions
are told they are sinners.
You get a better night's sleep if you try not to care. Being brutalised is
good for the quest for rest. (Others use hard drugs.) Watching that
documentary about the prison camp for young offenders in Khazakstan �
you'll know the one if you saw it, because it will have kept you awake too
� was a cue for several nights of anguish.
Not the hand-wringing of the "nice" politician whose caring sincerity is
painted on each morning with cosmetics provided by Avon, but the
unstoppable caring of being a human and seeing what is being done to other
humans. A baby slowly dying of hunger or thirst is enough to bring a
sickness to the pit of your stomach. No wonder the apologists for the
profit system sometimes say that those of us who are against it are sick.
In a way, we are.
But we should turn our sickness into something more than the despair of
empty care. Because however much we care or collect coins or campaigns or
hold rock concerts to complain against iniquities, the cause of the
trouble remains untouched. It remains and seems to laugh out loud at our
futile caring. Care as much as you want, it sneers, and see how much
feeling sorry for each other does for you.
Caring isn't enough. But not caring is enough to dehumanise us. Those who
don't care have lost a big piece of their humanity. It is the piece which
resides in everyone else.
So, it really is true that those poor wretches in Khazakstan need our
care, not least because the system which can so easily treat them like
dirt can next treat us like dirt. Just as it treats prisoners everywhere
like varying degrees of dirt. Remember the British prison governor who
resigned calling these places "penal dustbins"?
And it can treat people on the dole like dirt. And it can treat like dirt
wage-slaves who are forced to sell themselves for whatever lousy job comes
along. And it can teach children in its schools how to prepare themselves
to be treated like dirt. And these may be your children, or you may be
those children who have grown up to be treated like dirt. And even if you
don't care that they treat you like dirt, I do because the dirt rubs off
on everyone.
So, the starting point for doing what needs to be done is to care that the
world is how it is and that we are part of it. There will be no escape
through prayer. Lifetimes spent reforming little bits will at best remove
this or that speck of dirt from the system. But the system will still be
laughing � or, at least, the very few who profit from it will.
Because profit will continue to come before need. That is the golden law
of the profit system. There is no avoiding it unless you care enough to
take on the system itself: to say quite simply that profit should not come
before need � that we don't need production for profit.
One of the few signs of hope in a relatively hopeless age is that many,
many people are angry. Their anger all too frequently takes very
anti-social forms. But the anger indicates something about how they feel:
it indicates that they feel anything at all, and that discontent is in the
air. Even the kids who smash up public amenities because they hate the
world have not lost the urge to care about what the world is doing to
them.
Acting upon this care and consciously organising this mass of discontent
is an urgent task. It's not an ideal or daydream about a bright new
future. These humans are being trapped in Khazakstan now. And they are the
tip of an iceberg of human wretchedness which, if we don't care enough to
do something soon, will eventually, and in one way or another, make
wretches of us all.
Jt
www.worldsocialism.org
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