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Distance and Oppression |
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Posted 2/12/2010 at 10:08 AM by Theresa K |
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The PeaceJam website encourages me to follow current events and what is going on in the world more so than I did before this year. I read the newspaper and followed big stories online before but now I am personally invested in some situations. The green movement in Iran, the violence in the Congo, and the struggle for autonomy by Tibet. PeaceJam has brought these human rights struggles out of the news articles and into my mind constantly. The fact that I live in a different country from these issues used to create some kind of emotional distance. Now I feel that the space between me and people who struggle for basic needs and rights is consistently shrinking. Maybe it is because of the internet and how easy it is to keep updated on current events. Maybe it is because I hear about high school students in my city doing Global Call to Action projects on these issues. The philosopher Peter Singer argues that everyone has a moral obligation to prevent bad things from happening and that suffering and death from lack of food, water, and medical care are bad.
Peter Singer wrote:
"The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away. If we accept any principle of impartiality, universalizability, equality, or whatever, we cannot discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from us (or we are far away from him)." |
I have been thinking a lot about oppression and how I do not relate to oppressors. I feel anger and disgust towards people who would participate in taking away basic human rights of others. The government of Iran, the soldiers in the Congo. One of the principles of nonviolence that I struggle with is blaming the act of oppression and not the oppressors. I believe strongly that people are defined by their decisions and their actions. But the only way to defeat the oppressors is to rise above their crude, backward methods of violence and show them courtesy. That way the oppressed gain the upper hand and become irreproachable. Paul Farmer talks about the concept of "structural violence" in his books Mountains by Mountains and Pathologies of Power. He says that structural violence is the assault on human dignity and constraint on freedom resulting from historically given social and economic conditions such as extreme poverty and racism. I need to think of oppression in a more complex way rather than demonizing the "bad guys" or the "government". Many people unintentionally contribute to oppression though they wouldn't identify themselves as oppressors. The system serves them so they are happy with the status quo. In some cases I might be an oppressor by the products that I buy or the things that I say. I hope to concentrate my efforts on making the voice of the vulnerable heard instead of being angry and avoid oppressing others through my thoughtless actions like the plague. |
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