Useless solidarity

There was another attack on Paris. Very sad indeed but the more poignant article is this and it serves to elucidate the absolute lack of perspective with which people respond to news in today's news climate. I noticed that YouTube has started featuring the French flag which has also become a sort of a background for the profile pictures of many on Facebook. This is meant to represent solidarity with the French but is anything but. For companies like Google such displays of solidarity are little more than vehicles by which they say to their users that they are considerate corporations and not the power hungry behemoths that they really are. And for people, well the people will wait for the next tragedy so that they could use it to spice up their own empty lives and useless narratives. In the meantime these people will forget this tragedy soon enough and move on to posting their selfies and pictures of food. Very soon they will move on to doing what they do best on social media - selling themselves for the meaningless likes and approval of others.

I am not surprised anymore by either the opportunistic behavior of corporations or the blatant self-promotion (disguised more benevolently mind you) of individuals. But let's spare a thought for those who died and for those who were close to them and are still alive. Do they deserve the travesty that is this fake concern? This ridiculously dishonest veneer? I have always wanted to ask the following question to the many who I thought were faking it: Are you really concerned for a cause or do you just want to appear like a good human being in front of me and others? In other words, are you a real human being or just completely full of shit? I feel that for many many people the honest answer to this question is "yes, unfortunately I am just completely full of shit." This is the real answer that they would have given had they not been so completely full of shit.

Let's also stop here and think about those killed in Beirut and the downed Russian plane recently. Their lives are of no lesser value than the Parisians. Just because the news media doesn't find their stories juicy enough doesn't mean that the grief of their relatives is any less. For that matter let's also think about the innocent people who are killed every day by anonymous drones hovering out of sight on one hand and by the religious fanatics on the other. Most likely these people are the collateral damage of your solutions. And when our minds start reeling from the many conflicting facets of the story, from the relentless carnage, let's stop and think about how idiotic we appear when we decide to put some meaningless symbol of non-existence solidarity on our Facebook profiles just so that we could get some likes.