Jade

I got to thinking today about suffering, as I was nursing the hangover mentioned before! But not silly sticky self inflicted suffering, real suffering pain and poverty. A happy thought. We see most life through a lens or a screen in the west. The flooding and starving and bone crushing poverty that we see on the TV or on-line is objectified and turned into discourse until the writing, stories, myths and speculation surrounding the event become more important then the event and the people involved. We now care more about the nights in the super bowl than the thousands of people in New Orleans still have no home. How it demonstrated the inherent savageness of man, a return the primitive. Similarly the everyday plight of those in Zimbabwean becomes a list of evidence against Mugabe, rather than an actual physical reality for hundreds of thousands. The fact that I can sit here an write this shows my separation from these events, I must objectify them to then comment on how they have been objectified.
These thoughts were only crystallised during the story of Jade Goody. Hers was a life that was, to many of us, a story. From her birth into 'reality' to her actual death in front of our eyes she was ours. Her life only existed as an entertainment, as a stimulus to our lives. I think that is a vile type of inhumanity. But possibly inescapable.