The 3 year anniversary of the Grenfell tragedy has just passed. In memory green ribbons, both real and painted have appeared all over the area and they look like butterflies floating around the neighbourhood. Beautiful and heartbreaking. The tower itself seems to get smaller everytime you look at it. They have been incrementally been dismantling it for over a year or so and it feels that the more it disappears in the real world the more it disappears in people’s memories. And yet West London will never forget those who lost their lives because they will always be part of the community and also because justice has still not been served.
In the modern era we seem to now lurch from tragedy to tragedy and as soon as the next one arrives everyone forgets about the one that just dominated and focus instead on the latest calamity or injustice to take over the news. There is rarely any resolution. Whether its plastic pollution, Australian wildfires, the refugee crisis, homelessness, the school girls in kidnapped in Nigeria..at the time they all unleashed outrage and initiated mass online activity but were then dropped as quickly and as fervently as they were picked up.
These terrible events consume every headline and dominate your social media feed for the 2 weeks they are topical and then and they evaporate into the online ether as if they had never existed. A lethal combination of over-saturation and A.D.D destroys the public’s interest seemingly just in time for us to lose our shit all over again over the next thing. And the next thing. And there is now always a next thing. The conveyor belt of horror seemingly never ends.
People are already clearly over the pandemic and yet we are still in the eye of the storm. Does it matter it hasn’t been solved? Apparently not. People are already over climate change and that hasn’t even really begun yet. Does it matter it hasn’t been solved? Our actions say otherwise. These days there appears to be this notion that once everyone has done their bit of ranting on social media, fired off some hashtags and gone to a protest march or two the problem has been dealt with and we can all go back to shopping for shit we don’t need.
Nothing gets solved anymore, we just get bored and move on. The most recent humungous global event is the BLM movement which has shaken the world to the core in the last two weeks. It has been extraordinary to see the world unite in protest and say ‘enough is enough’. And yet, like the others I have just mentioned above, this is a deep rooted problem that needs, not just immediate action, but sustained activity that will lead to long term systemic solutions in order for genuine progress can be made.
As a species we need to start seeing things through to the end. We need to actually make things better, not just want them to be better and then give up and divest our energy into something else when it reveals itself to be too hard to fix overnight. Major societal shifts and systemic change are very hard to initiate and implement and take time. A ton of time. It takes research and understanding and education and planning and commitment and that cannot be achieved in two weeks. We have to see this through and think long term strategies than will span far into the future or progress will not be achieved.
