A common, if adolescent frustration comes when wondering why people can't just live sensibly. If everyone kept each other in mind and did what was best for society as a whole all our lives would be so much better. Indeed many people spend their whole lives in such a mindset, some of them making very successful careers out of it.
Unfortunately such a naive way of thinking is fundamentally flawed. Persons can be driven by moral and logical argument, people on the other hand, are driven by practical day to day concerns. My oft cited example of this is the decline in public support for the Vietnam war.
This did not come about via the changing of minds or the wining of arguments by the anti-war movement. It was simply that the number of dead and wounded servicemen continued to grow relentlessly, crossing more and more people's threshold of tolerance as it did. The exact same process seems to be starting again now with yet another ill planned conflict in an exotic and dangerous far away land.
Does this mean people are inherently selfish? Should the masses be condemned for their persistently self centred view of the world? No. We are a race of six billion self preservation machines. If you want to try and make people feel guilty about such a basic instinct you may as well join the Catholic church and try to stop people having sex.
In fact this facet of human nature provides a strong case for more small scale, decentralised governance, but that's a whole post in itself. What it also does, looking at the various unnecessary causes of suffering that abound, is beg the question in the sparkling words of Mr De La Rocha, what's it gonna take?
What has to happen before people refuse to tolerate the madness carried out in our names? How many people feel betrayed by Blair, can no longer trust that same old grin? We now have a situation, over education reforms, where a Labour Prime Minister is actually siding with the Conservatives against his own party. Is that enough? Is that sufficient for people to finally say 'fuck him' once and for all? Apparently not.
My girlfriend and I have recently being trying to find an NHS dentist in our area, as one of my wisdom teeth has been giving me grief. The best we could do was get added to a six month waiting list, after which we might be accepted. We could probably afford to go private, though I never would, but what about people who can't?
This nation which boasts so proudly to the rest of the world about it's healthcare-for-all system, is currently failing to provide some children with basic dental care on the grounds of personal wealth alone. Is that enough to get people up in arms, to demand that the NHS get what it needs? Apparently not.
It's tempting to think that these things just aren't quite nasty enough to evoke the self preservation response. Things like the successful poll tax riots or the not so successful miner's strike are perhaps better examples of how, when asked to eat more than a certain amount of shit, people get up and say no.
The trick is, it seems to me, communication. If people are made aware of the direct causal relationships between what they may consider remote and removed situations and the hardships they face in every day life, that inbuilt safety mechanism could be harnessed to great effect.
Still, this requires something to happen, something that enough people can agree is unacceptable and so we come back to the original question, what's it gonna take?
Speaking of pivotal events I just wanted to talk briefly about Hamas's victory in the Palestinian elections. My initial gut instinct here is that this could be a really good thing. I know a lot of people, particularly in Israel and the US, are shitting themselves that one end of such a volatile situation in now in the hands of a terrorist group, but I'm hopeful for a few good reasons.
Firstly, due it's rigid structure, Hamas is a pretty tight outfit and apparently lacks the endemic corruption until now perpetually associated with the Palestinian authority. Secondly, besides slaughtering innocent civilians in cold blood, Hamas has shown that it is capable of dealing with more civil matters, such as building, running and maintaining orphanages, schools and hospitals.
These latter infrastructual skills should serve them well as they begin governing the Palestinian people. Finally, the former skills mentioned, ie. murder, have been justified in the past as ‘necessary’. Just like terrorist groups throughout time and across the world, they have claimed that they have no choice but to wage war.
Hamas now have the opportunity to wield political power with a democratic mandate behind them. Now they do have a choice, there is another option. This being the case surely the violence of their past can no longer be justified. If Hamas are as noble as they claim they will seize this opportunity to better the lives of the people they now officially represent and maintain what they consider their moral high ground.
Of course it’s possible that they’ll just act like wankers, piss everyone off and cause a whole load more death and suffering for Palestinians and Israelis alike. An unfortunate side effect of this would be to shake people’s faith in democracy, (though having said this people seem to forget that Hitler was democratically elected.)
If Hamas do get their shit together, however, and it turns out their priority really is the Palestinian people an interesting, though probably bloody, situation may well arise. Imagine Israel launch some form of air attack on an a Palestinian area and Hamas respond with a rocket attack.
In the past Hamas’s actions would been considered terrorism with no questions or thought involved. Now however, we would be talking about one democratically elected government responding in kind to a military attack on it’s territory from another. Could the condemnation now be justified?
If Hamas can make this work then their victory will be ours as well as they will force us all to re-evaluate our definitions of ’terrorism’. And the way things are today maybe nothing less than that is what it would take.
