Who cares?

Do any of us really care about The War on Terror?

Do any of us really care about “The War on Terror”? I mean, it was all I could do to get motivated to even write this article as everyone has pretty much said all there is to say about it anyway, but seriously though, how many of us don’t tune out when we hear the latest goings on in Iraq?

Not a lot, I’d imagine, and while it is truly awful to think that people don’t care about the Middle-East and Iraq in particular, there are several reasons why we are so blasé about the whole sorry situation.

First of all, “The War on Terror” welcomes cynicism like no other conflict, maybe because it never should’ve been started in the first place. In our lifetime, we’ve witnessed two Gulf Wars and so many other global conflicts that they often merge into each other: Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Israel, Palestine and Darfor to name but a few of the most prominent, and as callous as it might sound considering the death tolls in all those places, the mass public are exasperated by the volume of such man-made disaster.

While 9/11 shocked society to its very core, the subsequent actions of the world’s most powerful leaders have not only worn our patience to a small stub but have been so bafflingly stupid that you can either do one of two things: blow a monumental gasket, or just stop caring. Other generations vented their anger at the likes of Vietnam but in our case, we went for the latter.

Part of this is no doubt due to the media and some of the coverage has been shamelessly partisan and/or ludicrously sensationalist, British papers and American cable news channels being particularly bad for this (some stations in America really need to be seen to be believed).

Even when coverage is balanced, it often reaches saturation point, with people sick of hearing about Iraq. It’s sad but it’s true, and while the situation in Lebanon has garnered much more interest, how long before we get sick of a second conflict in that part of the world as well?

What a curious and sorry position we are currently in, that there is so much disaster going on in the world, to which we have become immune, not to mention frustrated and cynical.

We have so much going on in our everyday lives that such faraway and omnipresent conflicts barely cost us a thought. At the moment we’ve just stopped caring, with no virtuous or upstanding leaders to believe in and no remote notion of blowing a gasket.

By: Paddy Duffy

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