Niger and Me: Hiding From the Way Things Are, With What I’m Going to Do

I know what’s happening and I know what’s wrong but I justify my existence using my passive awareness and the thing I’m ‘going’ to accomplish.

I can’t fucking stand it; it makes me want to vomit. I just caught the latest update on the famine in Niger on BBC World. These people are dying slow and painful deaths in consequence of our luxury. And don’t tell me that they’re lazy and we work harder and that’s just the way supply and demand works. A three-month-old child born into starvation and surely suffering brain retardation from mal-nutrition can hardly be blamed for their circumstance. We weep when a dozen or so get shot up by some spoiled others in a school shooting but thousands are dying of starvation because of our own ignorance.

But what really makes me sick in all this is myself. I know what’s happening and I know what’s wrong but I justify my existence using my passive awareness and the thing I’m ‘going’ to accomplish. I know what’s happening but what can I really do? These things are macro problems (Take that you post-modernist. Actually I’m a pot-modernist, only a critical one) and need macro solutions. So I bury myself in an education so that I can keep telling myself that one day I’ll write the book that changes all this.

But what if such intentions are just a façade typical of the intellectualizing class. Maybe we construct such aims in order to hide from the truth. How many intellectuals are there and how many really make a difference? So one or two every fifty some odd years sifts through all the pretension and posturing and writes something worth reading. And this is the goal I set for myself because if I didn’t I couldn’t justify anything.

Someone once asked me whether I thought this kind of accomplishment was really a realistic goal. I replied, “No, of course not.” Then I repeated myself, and trailed off. What else was there to say? At that moment I understood the existentialists, but what does this mean? Is my seemingly benevolent cause only a justification made in blind faith, a kind of mega-justification on which all the other justifications of my fragile life relies?