Appalled

As you probably know, I typically do not comment on politics on this blog.  This was a decision I made almost as soon as I started writing regularly as I found that politics tended to fog people's ability to actual discuss and listen to certain issues.  (I found other outlets to put those comments into).  As a result, for at least seven years the fate of political world has gone virtually unnoticed if you just scanned the contents of what I write about.

That is not about to change with this post either; instead, I want to comment on the reactions to a particular political situation and the impact I have seen in the social media.

The situation:  The ongoing soft invasion (I do not see how you can define it any other way) of Ukraine.  The Social Media:  Facebook. 

I admit that am an international relations junkie - so much so that sometimes I find it difficult to disengage my regular life to not follow events.  And I admit that I am perhaps more conscious of such things that the bulk of many people I know.  But it is with a great deal of sadness and shame I conclude that we as a group have become almost completely narcissistic and perhaps useless.

Facebook, as you may know, trends things.  They have also "helpfully" put little news blurbs on the main page now.  The listings?  Social updates:  Bieber meets Selena in Starbucks, death of such and such, someone wins an Oscar.  Not once since the situation started in the Ukraine would anyone have an idea that something was going on somewhere else in the world.

And the postings?  From an otherwise highly interactive and vocal group about this group's rights or that party's failings, nothing.  It's as if the whole situation never happened.

It depresses me deeply.

Why?  Because it is indicative of a malaise that runs through the body social and the body politic.  We have become so trivialized and so focused on us and our little part of the world and what we believe should be going on that we have lost the ability to look at the larger world around us and realize changes there affect us as well.  Oh, many people will argue that we need to be globally active for something like climate change, but we miss the fact that political systems and regimes can have as much impact on our here and now as anything climate based.

Not one person I know has posted anything.  Not one person I know has posted anything indicating solidarity with the Ukrainian republic, the same group that will fall over themselves to post graphics for their own chosen political or social cause.

It saddens me.  It depresses me.  I admit that I am an anachronism, someone that holds that people should living under governments they themselves choose and should be free from inconveniences such as the fear of invasion or economic blackmail.

I admit I am an anachronism.  I am just a little shocked that I should find myself to be so alone in my beliefs.