Empathy Overload

Marshal McLuhan Centennial of your birth. “Go to hell”

Many Universities around the globe are celebrating his prescient theories. Back in the 60ies and 70ies he was writing about where the media was going to take us. I remember those arguments over, “the medium is the message.” Worse than that was his notion, of the “Global Village.” Yes the media was going to turn us into one all embracing society across all man made boundaries. McLuhan was one of the rare thinkers, artists who somehow are able to see the future without any clear consciousness as to how they arrived there.

Back in the sixties, seventies I thought, surely there would be an increase in the number of television sets but never could have foreseen the explosion of the Internet IPods, Mextexts Cellphones with cameras etc. etc. Indeed, in many ways the world is now a village. Here’s where I breakdown with empathy overload.

Back in my own "good old days" I might have read something about a drought in Africa or Asia.That was probably transmitted by the dot dash code of Telegraph and it was surely a week or a month old. Now it’s instant photographs taken with cellphone cameras. Here in front of me on this computer screen are thousands of starving, thirst driven Ugandan women carrying their starving babies to an already overflowing refugee camp in Kenya. Just a sample of the Global Village that is now relentless in its daily story of all the horrific droughts, fires and the monumental disasters being brought on by Global Climate Change. In the old days it was simply Colonialism.

Oh, so you think I’m finished? Not so fast. Here comes the foreclosure, unemployment crisis, collective bargaining crisis in Wisconsin, the abortion fight in Kansas, the Fukushima Nuclear meltdown. Instant pictures of those poor poor old Japanese men and women walking around in a daze, The Haiti earthquake just shows us that forever poverty. Their tent villages just waiting for the next hurricane to blow them away. And yes, my wife insists, that the Polar Bears loss of habitat is the Canary in the Global climate crisis that will do us all in.

On top of all that there’s all the left wing causes threatening me to give them money or we are looking at the “end of days.” How can I take on the Global scene when I’m struggling to hang on to the local disasters? From my empathy bank I have very little left over for the Debt Crisis. That seems so inconsequential when I look at those dyeing mothers and bloated babies in Africa.

In my lifetime I have often confronted the problem, what burning issue of the day should I spend my energy on? The old Marxist solution was to find the link in the socio economic chain that would help to fundamentally change the society. Maybe that’s how I ended up in the Labor Movement? Now my empathy scale sends me all over the place. That could be precisely because we do not have a program to make any fundamental changes in the present system of Market Capitalism.

Could that be what is sending me into an empathy overload crisis? Or is it just Mcluhan’s Global Village?