Learning to Live With Global Violence

Since the UN Security Council failed to pass its resolution on Syria late on Saturday night last week – it would have been Resolution 2035 -, I have spent hours on the Guardian’s live blog, on Al Jazeera or curated Twitter lists to try and stay updated on events in Syria. But even the most informative live blog cannot mask the feeling of intense powerlessness in the face of the killing of Syrian people by their own government; moral outrage alone is very bad at stopping tanks and grenades. And there’s a certain voyeuristic element in clicking the refresh button, as if to say, “Let’s see whether there’s more bloodshed.” Eventually, the sad realization sets in that this kind of killing – the loss of dozens or hundreds of lives in a city, in a single day – probably happens almost every day in one of the world’s conflict zones. Except that on most days, we simply don’t have the news shoved into our face, and we’re not too keen to inquire about it either.