The alarm sounds, but nobody wakes up. In the perpetual panic, the tragedy is the undisputed holder who parades at the foot of the screen while we have breakfast.
Gaza burns, Iran and Israel tense the rope, the United States threatens to enter the quadrilateral and Ukraine is no longer a trend, except when an image is scandalous enough to sneak between videos of cats and offers of e-commerce. Migrants are hunted in surgical raids, while the crime has perfected the bureaucracy that authorities only imitate: administers, charges and protects more effectively than any state. Does anyone remember the last shooting at a school? Or was it already displaced by the penultimate?
We live anesthetized by disaster abundance. Horror is a good daily consumption, while compassion, a scarce luxury and in extinction. We live a continuous alarm cycle, where each startle erases the previous one. A missile falls on a hospital, the network is flooded with automatic condolences, minutes later a celebrity is canceled and the world priority changes headquarters. In this shock fair, the only certainty is oblivion. The news is the new plague: the one that manages to be distracted faster.
Thus, the “business as usual“It is no longer just a cynical expression of power. It is the way of generalized existence. Horror, injustice, environmental catastrophe and racism are routine, and routine becomes landscape.
The war went from a secret strategy to a predictable choreography. The news distributes low and missiles with the diction of a meteorological part. Politicians simulate concern, markets adjust their bets, technological ones perfect filters so that blood does not stain advertisements. The audience, trained in the art of oblivion, demands a daily dose of tragedy with a different flavor: today the Middle East, tomorrow Ukraine, the next day migrants, and always, in the desktop, a new variant of corruption.
The information runs and runs so much that it flees from itself. The really urgent is relegated to the basement of priorities. Climate change – the enemy without face or trending topic– progress while the planet is overheats in slow motion. Glaciers do not melt in viral videos. The fires do not appear in rounds of negotiations. Extinction is not going to be measured in likes, But it will have total engagement. And perhaps the rains only make us run and take refuge, without other action of greater reach. Our attention, programmed for the immediate, does not detect the irreversible or the gradual.
Business as usual It is the phrase with which the world manages its ruin. We continue working, producing, tweeting, trusting that the next scandal replaces the discomfort of the previous one. The crime is institutionalized, the policy is banalized, the authority is delegated, democracy is gamificaempathy is monetized and attention is wasted. Everything remains the same, precisely because nothing remains the same.
At this precise moment, someone dies in a conflict, someone is a victim of injustice, someone drowns in a sea without rescue, someone lights the air conditioning to forget the heat that he himself generates. And we, meanwhile, change the channel, waiting for the following scandal, the new trend, the next oblivion.
We live a state of alarm without shocks, an apocalypse dosed in seasons, an emergency succession administered by the neglect. If everything is serious, nothing is. If everything demands attention, nothing deserves memory.
Perhaps true urgency is that clarity in attention. Stop in vertigo. Wondering about what does not make noise, but is burning our feet. Otherwise, the next disaster will be expected to continue ignoring the previous one. Business as usual.
About the author:
* Eduardo Navarrete is a specialist in futures studies, journalist, photographer and head of content in UX Marketing.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-navarrete
Mail: (email protected)
Instagram: @elnavarrete
The opinions expressed are only the responsibility of their authors and are completely independent of the position and the editorial line of Forbes Mexico.
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