Nobody wants to talk about Yemen. It’s not in the news. While hurricanes and Syria are centre front.
Yemen is at the 
back pushed against the wall.
Over two years of conflict has left 10000 dead, 50000 injured, leaving 18 million Yeminis in need of humanitarian assistance. Added to that is a huge Cholera epidemic spreading by the day.
Why do we not care? Why does the press not report on Yemen? The press has always discriminated on news. But it is ultimately trying to sell news to a public who are Western, White, Wealthy in relative terms, and Democratic(?) We are villagers with old lumbering village brains. The next village is too far and too foreign for us to care about. We care about our own village. If the next village has an impact on our village that is something else. Then we care…more.
But otherwise the relationships and dynamics in our own village take all our energy. To live and survive takes a lot of energy which we only have a finite amount of. We have family and friends to take care of. And if we don’t – we have complex enough lives needing constant maintenance. Our attention is elsewhere.
It is not that we don’t care – it’s that we have our own Western lives to deal with. At this time Western life has many distractions close to home to avoid and numb against the dislocation and disconnectedness of wealthy living.
Sex, drugs, alcohol, exercise, academia are a few of the distractions that help us through this world in the 21st Century.
Conversely an awareness of war and strife across the globe nags at us. The West is vulnerable to attack. This creates a living anxiety which permeates through our lives, relationships and decision making. Our brains are used to this: the constant threat of attack is monitored by our inbuilt fight and flight response. It seems we are bent on recreating a primitive world which our ancestors lived in.
Is modernity just a sheen of pretence that we have advanced?
Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2017
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Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique