Reality innovation

Two weeks ago Sisters of a Down stated when receiving an MTV award for the Best Alternative that “civilization is a fck... failure”. Nice statement in front of a hundred million people, typical of an alternative band who wants to call for attention, you would say. In the same ceremony, Madonna calls to the stage Bob Geldof and hands him the award for Free Your Mind. Appropriate, you would say. After all, he is the guy that put all those hungry African children faces in front of our eyes 10 years ago and now did it again. It seems we are now completely untouched by them, but he did manage to put together a nice quantity of money and everyone believes this is going where it should go.

I have just seen Isabel Coixet’s film The Secret Life of Words. She is definitely capable of arousing deep feelings and make your eyes water, she can tell a love story with very few words and things are always in the verge of erupting, but they never do. What affected me was the girl’s story about her trial at the Balkans, where she was held prisoner in a hotel by her OWN army, together with 15 other women, and was repeatedly raped, even by ONU troops. The scene where Julie Christie, playing the role of a representative of an organization that deals with this issue, stating that there were MANY, MANY like this girl and asks him if he didn’t read the papers 10 years ago, made me very uncomfortable.

I was a grown man when both these events took place, I saw both the hungry faces of the African children and I remember reading the horror stories in the Balkans. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t cry, I didn’t stop what I was doing and went there, I didn’t send a fat check to some institution (I didn’t have it, but that’s beyond the point). So that makes me a bad person, and if there is a hell, I will probably have a seat waiting for me on isle J.

Now think about this.
For every guy that does one of the things I said I didn’t do, there are at least a million that didn’t do anything. That is an awful lot of bad people, when you do your hell heading headcount. And these people, including me, are really not that bad, just like the people that did something are angels on earth. But something is really screwed up with civilization because this shouldn’t happen. I shouldn’t be able to live with myself knowing that there are so many million children dying of hunger when there is so much waste around me. I should not be able to live with myself knowing that in a country right in the heart of Europe, people are doing to each other what they did in the Balkans. And HEY, there is TODAY plenty of these situations around, the children are still dying and there is somewhere, right now, closer than we would expect, doing something terrible to his fellow man and woman. So where did we go wrong, what can we do?

We need to innovate in what really matters. We need to innovate in the way we FEEL, in the way we LIVE our lives, in our ATTITUDES. We have to innovate in the way we COMMUNICATE reality, since it is clear that a hungry face won’t move a million people. We need to innovate in the way we deal with POVERTY and VIOLENCE, we need to innovate in the way we deal with MONEY and WEALTH. Damm, this would really be innovation and I would love to be part of this process. I wouldn’t even mind being a guinea pig and have others test on me these innovations, help me become a better person, help me sleep better. Knowing IS NOT enough. Seeing IS NOT enough. Feeling IS NOT enough. So, what does it take? Can we do Reality innovation, innovate where it REALLY matters?