Students from a Maryland high school protest demanding gun control
action from the US Congress on February 21, 2018. PHOTO | AFP
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and once the richest man in the
world, recently did an open question
session on one of the major social media platforms, Reddit, which he then followed up with a great question for the online community.
session on one of the major social media platforms, Reddit, which he then followed up with a great question for the online community.
To paraphrase, he
asked: Considering all the bad news out there in the world, what is
something good that is happening right now?
We all need
a palate cleanser from time to time, especially when the 24-hour news
cycle is so obsessed with reporting increasingly “hard” news. Hard in
the sense of hard to bear, usually the violence and despair of the human
condition.
It is very important not to turn away from
this lest we ignore or worse yet forget that there is suffering and we
can do better. But sometimes it does feel like a little levity is needed
in newsrooms, like maybe they should experiment with breaking good news
at least once in a while.
So the question about what
is good in the world opened the floodgates of optimistic information
ranging from the health of bees to the reminder that never has the world
been a healthier and more prosperous place for humanity... in spite of
what the news makes us feel like. Palate cleansed. In that spirit I
offer some of the nicer “things” that have happened recently.
Students
from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, US, who are
taking on the issue of gun control are an inspiration. They have been
met with predictable resistance along the way, but what I found
interesting is how frequently their detractors tried to dismiss these
young people as being too immature to be doing this of their own
volition.
In return the students have proved to be very
eloquent, passionate, peaceful, informed and determined. They might
even be able to get a breakthrough on the gun control debate that
previous attempts by adults and politicians haven’t managed.
In
a similar vein — and this I found out from a comedy show of all places —
students at a secondary school in Sydney Grammar School, Australia,
figured out how to make a generic version of a very expensive drug in
their chemistry laboratory. So they are making it to figure out how to
either give it away for free to those who need it, or considerably
undercut the prices set by Big Pharmaceutical.
We all
know that young people are kind of wonderful but it is so nice to be
given reminders like this about what they can achieve — both in politics
and in science. Although arguably the student chemists who are trying
to disrupt drug prices are also engaging in a form of political
activism.
I am still waiting patiently for the day
when we allow youth and children to wield considerable influence over
our governments as important peers and moral compasses. Imagine what it
would be like to live in the kind of utopia that level of unvarnished
idealism would strive for.
In a virtual way, though,
this utopia is within reach. It is hard to fathom how much social media
has shrunk the world and is creating a radical egalitarianism.
Anyone
at any age of any gender from anywhere could sit at a computer on the
other side of the world from a Bill Gates or an Elon Musk (can we insist
that he is an African? Yes? Okay) and be able to chat with them
casually about whether a hotdog is a sandwich or not, or how their
projects are going, or what they can do to make the world slightly
better and completely collapsing the hierarchies that we so like to
create between ourselves. Now that is a palate cleanser.
Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: elsieeyakuze@gmail.com
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