Despair and Hope

Is there any hope of reconciliation between our normative opinions of ‘should and should not be’ around human rights, and the extreme difficulty that we as individuals face in sparking real substantial change, especially in cases of extreme issues of human rights violations?  Is the gap unbridgeable?

In class, we learn about issues from a distance, we discuss these problems from a distance, and we come to potential solutions – what should be - from a distance.  Long-term normative and ideological shifts towards human rights compliance require action now – we cannot leave it to develop ‘naturally.’  Those who appeal to the notion that some radical future ideological perspective will apparently uphold rights may also appeal to contemporary human nature as a defence for some of our most banal actions of evil – something is contradictory.  If we grant that such long-term change is possible, we also have to reconcile that our immediate inaction means that lives are currently being scarified knowingly – in the name of a future ideal.  We are complicit in that.  I am guilty, you are guilty – our inaction is ‘sin’ perhaps, because inaction can easily be shared by all. 

Action seems most accessible and outcomes most obtainable in the face of issues that are easiest to solve.  The violating bans against Islamic head-scarves and the desire for marriage between two LGBT individuals – these are pop-culture.  What about the lives that exist in the vacuum of the unliving in Guantanamo Bay? Or is it easier to sell a necessary ‘other,’ rather than a suffering individual who has been rid every freedom and right of life because freeing them means admitting our complicity?  This case is one of life or death - but we are more concerned with a slightly unsavoury violation of a right that requires life, rather than one that denies it.

Action is not a choice anymore. But any action available to me now has such limited impact that it is almost unjustifiable.  How can I reconcile this?

I am drawn to tears with every extra detail I come to know, but I can’t look away.  Mainstream news, independent media, photojournalism, and the never ending library of video clips from real life locations accessible 24 hours a day – it grows and grows in front of me, a barricading pile of debris.

Is this Rose’s ‘broken middle’ - understanding the brokenness between the need for action and the lack of impact in the face of the pile of debris blocking my way? I am unsure yet if this is a space of despair or of hope, or of both.