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POLITICAL CORRECTNESS - "I could not care less about the people suffering in Africa. They are too far away and too culturally different from me. Yes, I want their lives to be better, but if they cannot sort out their own mess, then why should I?"
I view these comments as racist, xenophobic, nationalistic, stupid, selfish and/or ignorant. The Politically Correct movement of the 1990s has meant that I would have a great deal of support to the extent that they would be generally considered unacceptable. That is seemingly a welcome development, but has it led to any practical improvement?
The comments are (although I very much doubt that I am 100 percent word-for-word accurate) taken from a British radio phone-in during the mid-1980s, in which the subject of aid to Africa was debated. The uncaring, right wing stance the man took received no criticism from the broadcasters, but he was even viewed as if he somehow contributed to the argument. However, at the same time Comic Relief and Live Aid in Europe were donating millions of necessary aid to starving Africans.
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In California, $120,000 was raised recently to catch a man who killed a dog. This was considerably more than the amount given by that State to the millions of Mozambique, starving and dying every day. For a whole week, British people were up in arms because their banks proposed extra cash machine charges. The banks even had to withdraw their plans due to the mass protesting and mini-demonstrations that kept the front pages of the papers occupied. Yet only weeks before, the reaction to Chancellor Gordon Brown's decision to cancel Third World debt was not only muted within the international community, but it saw only extremely mild approval and disapproval in the British press. And when two UN member states asked all of the world's prosperous nations not to buy Angolan diamonds because the revenue has been used to fund the bloody civil war there, did anyone pay any attention?
The Politically Correct movement, often silly and pointless, did at least have the right intentions. If it can be administered as the basis for a pragmatic transformation of Western society, whereby actual help for those who really need it is promoted, and not just linguistic change, then historians in years to come will view it as a success.
Otherwise it would have been as useless as the man who made the comments presumably would have predicted it to be.
To give aid to Mozambique, go to http://www.dec.org.uk
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