Priorities

Talking specifically about my ‘bigger picture’ ambitions, it does frustrate me when the things that I hold to be important are belittled in favour of other things that others deem more so. I’m not naive, nor do I think that my ideas are always better than anyone elses, however I try to refrain from having a dig at someone else’s priorities.

In this case I’m referring to a comment that was made following a post I read about how much more plastic there will be than fish in the oceans by 2050. The writer in question was incensed that we should be wasting time on such things when there were obviously  much more important problems to be worried about like terrorism, wars and plenty of other humanitarian crises.

These are obviously problems, and by obvious, I also mean that they are immediate, graphic, and recognisably frightening problems, that invoke an instant emotional response. In that way, they provide us with an easy focus for our fears, and supposedly a relatively small choice of options for dealing with them. Find and eliminate the bad guys. The idea is simple, even if putting it into action and carrying it out, is not.

For me, it’s not that simple. There are many, many complex social conditions that lead to war and terrorism, and I don’t believe that it can be simplified into a struggle of good versus evil, or even us versus them. It’s too big a topic to explore here and now, in the ten minutes I have before work, but my response to this kind of prioritising, would go something like this…

If we can find a way to somehow realise and accept, globally, that we have big environmental problems, and that there is a lot we could (and should) be doing to make the world a better place, then these problems have the potential to bring us all together. Rather than fighting over who has more or less, we could work together to make sure that we all have enough, with some to spare… and share.