Filed under: activism, church, community, culture, global, justice, neighborhood, urban
in an age when mass media pipes instant images of chinese earthquake victims and the burmese cyclone disaster into our living rooms and onto our smart phones, it’s ever increasingly popular to be socially conscious, especially as global tragedies and body counts take turns piling up. and while we acknowledge and appreciate the technology, most of us are puzzled as to how to respond. we feel bad in a distant sort of way, or maybe we donate some money to our preferred humanitarian organization, and sometimes we offer up a prayer if we’re the religious type. we watch the news coverage and are temporarily horrified by the conditions in which most of the world lives, but then we go back to our hyper-commodified lives and numb ourselves with entertainment or- ironically- consider some celebrity’s endorsement of the social cause-of-the-day we should support to alleviate our privileged guilt. (more…)
