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April 16, 2003
Petty Annoyances
Autumn, 1998. Hurricane Mitch hit Central America. I had just left Guatemala a few days before; a friend of mine was staying in La Ceiba, Honduras, the coastal town where the hurricane hit. For the next few months, I worked for one of the relief organisations; one day, some of my colleagues were discussing the overwhelming response from the public. ‘It’s because it’s not Africa,’ one of them said. ‘They’re bored with Africa; they’re responding because it’s somewhere new.’
Four and a half years later. I’m gripped in work-related despair, and note the grievances of those around me. Trains delayed or overcrowded, hangovers, put-downs from colleagues, dissatisfaction with their bodies, being irritated by colleagues and depressed by the turn their careers are taking, problems with their families, missing documents, unwanted phone calls. Perhaps people are more willing to complain about external annoyances, joys and happy experiences being too personal to share with all. Yet Londoners are notable for their high stress levels and intolerance levels, where a red light, a slow walker, a delay of a few seconds are unacceptable and unforgivable. Yes, Londoners are cynical, but I suppose I’m not just talking about them; Londoners are simply the race I know best of the ones I’m considering. Then again, I can recall newspaper articles and the American passion for litigation, to the point where strangers are almost afraid of assisting others in case they find themselves sued. A small mistake, a lack of courtesy being sufficient for a frivolous court case and inflicting unnecessary stress and hardship on others.
I spent Saturday lunchtime hanging out with a Lebanese woman married to a Turkish Cypriot, a Cuban woman, a Jamaican woman and an English woman. While discussing the media coverage of the current war, the Lebanese woman commented that local youths have suddenly become experts on the geography of Iraq; thanks to the pre-war propaganda, we’re aware of the dire human rights situation of Iraq.
What people are less aware of are the Ethiopians who were protesting outside the Royal Institute of International Affairs a few days before war broke out, trying to raise awareness of their own human rights and humanitarian crisis, nor of the ongoing war in Liberia which never so much as makes the newspapers despite the fresh waves of violence. People from such countries often only impact on us in the form of refugees, a pet target as the media are able to manipulate them into freeloading, dangerous, unworthy recipients of Taxpayers’ Money and stealing jobs which in reality nobody else might want. These people’s backgrounds are ignored; we have been taught to feel little or no sympathy for them despite what they may have been through or what might have driven them to seek refugee status in this country. Interestingly, at least in context, an innundation of Iraqi refugees is expected, and I wonder if they will receive the same reception as those who have preceeded them.
Here in the West, we have our public services, our choice of careers, our comparative social and political freedom, our opportunities to our passions, and the tools to build a secure cocoon around ourselves, blocking out unpleasant realities from other cultures which might filter into the world we have created for ourselves and produce an imbalance. America as a whole is a prime example: an immigrant nation, proudly clutching at the nationality of their ancestors, but openly hostile and mistrustful of modern-day immigrants. Even with their diverse cultural mix, they appear to be racist, xenophobic and bigoted, denying themselves the rich cultural influences they could draw on and instead embrace. But it’s all too easy, returning to my previous idea, to invest our energy and money in ways to indulge ourselves, perhaps taking the sting out of the day, perhaps as a necessary tonic to maintain a sense of wellbeing. But in that way we can allow ourselves to be extremely restrictive in what we allow ourselves to take in or involve ourselves in, whether through lack of awareness or interest, protectiveness around our free time, abhorrence or resistance, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s not the generic definition of a good time; perhaps it’s simply not something someone’s going to mention at work when discussing their evenings or weekends with colleagues.
The problem is, there really is a big, bad world out there, and a very big one at that. The Lebanese and Cuban women talked about being shocked at the pettiness of the attitudes they came across; I like to return to Central America frequently, not only for personal reasons, but also to remind myself of a different perspective and of what really matters in life. In the meantime, I translate for a human rights organisation, and read the Guatemalan newspapers daily, although they appear to have been somewhat muzzled and I’m aware that the only way to find out the stories of what’s really happening is through reluctant hearsay. A Japanese tourist gets killed during a mugging; a group of missionaries are kidnapped in the north; a bus driver of tourists is lynched in a mountain village for taking photographs of the children. A friend hitched a lift in the east and found himself and his friend at gunpoint in the middle of a field. The wider picture is of government corruption and impotence, of social uncertainty and instability, where you’re more likely to be mugged or attacked by the police than aided by them. Where if you stick out physically, you’ll probably be robbed or kidnapped; if your reputation sticks out, you might receive death threats. And yet that’s a picture of a country at peace, post-conflict. Stories of countries in civil war are more painful to absorb, but at least awaken us to the injustice that reigns outside our protected society, and which only slightly fades once peace is restored. Peace doesn’t mean that the problems and human rights abuses fade, if anything it means that the international attention is switched off, and we become blasé, imagining a situation parallel to our own, and switch off ourselves, quickly forgetting the passion we had for the plight of that country.
If we ever did. I guess the point I’m getting at – I want to get to bed and curl up with a book – is that these Western nations live the lives of the privileged few, where the petty annoyances and political injustices are insignificant compared to those elsewhere in the world; we would be horrified and outraged at what other societies take for granted as the cost of every day life. Although I learned years ago that personal suffering does not necessarily outweigh another’s, what shocks me is the lack of perspective, the lack of awareness or interest in stepping outside the box into the larger, perhaps more disturbing world outside, yet inherently more real. Maybe it’s cosier in the cocoon, but what can be ultimately gained from indefinitely blocking the world outside?