Three monkeys…

Image by MauMau - A great graffiti artist

There’s always something going on in this big wide world of ours isn’t there? Fortunately most of the time I manage to allow it all to wash over me, even manage to avoid it. I’m not saying that I hide my head in the sand, I don’t. I read the news online, watch News at Ten every night, listen to PM on Radio 4, so I know what is going on, and where, and to whom, and sometimes even why. But I don’t take it in too deeply. It is just the stuff that happens, most of which none of us can do anything about other than find it shocking or awful or terribly wrong.

Sometimes I wonder why we watch the news or read the papers. What is it that drives us to want to know about the misery of the world when we can’t do anything much to stop it. We listen to the evil in the world, watch the evil in the world and then comment on the evil of the world as if we are simply not a part of it. Oh, I know that the Band Aids and Comic Reliefs make a difference, but compared to all the other stuff that goes on that we can do diddley-squat about they really are a tiny drop in a vast, storm-tossed ocean.

Maybe we simply have a need to know because we are all part of the same big onion and we need to share experience. But if that really was the case how can we explain the thugs who beat an innocent teenager to death or the totalitarian regime that happily take us to the edge of destruction, even over it? They can’t be part of it can they? They seem to only be interested in themselves.

What am I saying here? I’m not really sure. Ignorance is Bliss? It’s no use crying over spilled milk? Lest we forget? Leave me alone? Maybe I’m simply saying I don’t want to know because, even though I think I have to, I don’t. Or maybe I’m hoping that we might learn from what happens even though history always proves that not to be the case. Or perhaps I can’t be bothered to see it, hear it, or even talk about it any longer. There! I’ve even managed to confuse myself.

Maybe we are all monkeys after all.