Admittedly, in the last ten years attention has increased on such important issues as global warming, climate change, elephant killings or the Paris Agreement, but it must also be said that much remains to be done. For example, a video of a poor lady falling down a ladder can have ten or twenty million views, while another video, of similar length, but on climate change or forest deforestation, if it gets a hundred is a lot. For those of us who work on these issues, things are quite strong, but at the same time it is the engine that keeps us going.
And it is that we are in the «Civilization of the show», as Mario Vargas Llosa coined it, the title of his essay on the subject. In this magnificent description of the time we have had to live, the author of "The city and the dogs" tells of a young sculptor who tried to emerge in Paris, without any success. Not even his cat came to his small exhibitions. They were pure loss. One day he went to a radio station and told them what he was up to. They found what the boy described to them newsworthy and they immediately began to broadcast it. For the first time in Paris a sample of sculptures made from authentic human excrement was presented. Needless to say, the queue of people went around the block and the boy turned the shit into gold.
This anecdote is a symptom of an era of sensations, sensationalism, search for pleasure in the strange, in the never seen or done, in the novelty as entertainment, the spectacle, the light news, the easy image, the quick video or the inconsequential video. taken and released from the pocket phone. All this together with the short time dispensed to each visited content, since it is necessary to go on to the next, to the other, to the link found, and so all day, with the aggravating circumstance that when night comes, very little remains of the hundred and means of topics of all kinds seen in the day. We are in a dizzying time, of immediacy, pragmatism, of the individual who wants everything quickly. The average residence time somewhere on the network is measured in seconds.
But not only technology has been what has brought us until this time of the "Carpe diem", which prescribes enjoying the day as if it were the last. There are other factors than "gadgets" and "apps" and that have relegated interest in knowledge to a third level. Societies have begun to withdraw literature, philosophy and history from pensums. Editors now prefer morals-less tales, best sellers, and interactive comics to literature. Some literary agencies post "no poetry accepted" signs on their websites. Only the "Beware, brave dog, poets do not approach!" It is the "culture of the 21st century", say those who defend this system.
Viktor Frankl in his essay, "In the face of existential emptiness", already in the 1950s spoke about the frustration caused by the lack of meaning in life, an important clue to understanding what is happening. We also find a common thread in Espidio Freire in his "Mileuristas, portrait of the generation of a thousand euros", referring to European youth, but more or less applicable to all latitudes. Freire tells us in 2006 about the number of young professionals, brilliant, graduates cum laude, speakers of three and four languages, but who must live in precariousness, with an average salary of one thousand euros per month, which has since decreased and now many they would like to earn those thousand euros, forced to live close to their parents until they are 30 and 40 years old,in an affluent society that has not rewarded them for their efforts, much less their knowledge. To them, almost from the cradle, their parents had been saying that, if they studied hard and graduated with good grades, they would be guaranteed an excellent quality of life, a promise that was not fulfilled in most cases.
Given this reality, how can they be required to acquire more knowledge? These young people, who have burned their eyelashes studying for much of their adolescence and youth, once inserted into the job markets have crashed into the harsh reality that the salary is barely enough to survive. Others suffer worse luck because they do not manage to leave the armies of unemployed and many only obtain positions of interns, almost without pay. Worse still, in the rearview they see parental advice again and again, but when they look through the windshield what they see is a lot of ill-prepared people, to say the least, swimming in pools full of bills, often from bad money had.
Roughly, what is described here is the amalgam of our days, a make of frustration, rage, resentment and rebellion, and explains, in part, why the old lady who falls down the stairs has twenty million reviews and the topics of the planet hundred. The video is faster and more fun than the ten minutes it takes to read what happened to the jungle in Borneo, just to cite an example. It is not surprising that the reparation of the planet, promised to the youth by the same generation that offered quality of life in exchange for school sacrifices, is not credible, why should it be? Are the politicians setting a good example? All this underlies inside their heads like an intangible nebula, while the "carpe diem" is a safe bet and more affordable for them. Given this reality, it is not easy for those of us who have Earth activism as a passion to get young and not so young to focus their attention on greenhouse gases, sustainable development or the destruction that is taking place right now in the Amazon rain forest,The world's lung.
The UN-sponsored COP23 is approaching, to be held in the German city of Bonn, between 6 and 17 November next. It will be chaired by Fiji, that charming little island in the Pacific, highly vulnerable to climate change. So the twenty-third installment of the Climate Change Conferences will be the first to have two heads. May the opportunity be good to begin to focus attention on these events and especially involve children, adolescents and young people, as the UN and other organizations are already doing. It is very gratifying to hear children from different latitudes speak with so much emotion and sincerity about the planet and the future that they wish for Mother Earth. It is truly a commendable work of the UN. To conclude, it is mandatory to grant special recognition to Mrs. Patricia Espinosa,Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC *, which has given her a world to bring COP23 to a successful conclusion. This event is worth checking out.
* United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
To learn more about the author visit:
Website: http://sgerendask.com/articulos-publicados
Twitter: @sgerendaskiss and @sandorgerendask
Facebook: Sandor Alejandro Gerendas-Kiss and Los libros de Gerendas-Kiss
LinkedIn and Instagram
