Watched 12 Years A Slave last night. Im still in pieces, mostly with sadness, but also an anger thats surprised me with its force. The thing is, the structures that created that situation - that encourage people to exploit others, and to stifle their own capacity for empathy, in pursuit of whatever object their inevitable hunger takes - those structures still exist. Theres substantial contextual difference between the slavery this film portrays and, say, the subsistence-level conditions of workers in Indonesian sweatshops, or the treatment of migrant labourers in Dubai, but the same thing underpins each. The belief that individual comfort and power is the only mature and respectable object of our ambitions, and that if the pursuit of equality impedes this we should disregard it, is a lasting and pernicious weight on all of us; and as long as we carry it, well all be weaker, slower, sadder and much, much poorer.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Jan 2014 10:07:11 +0000
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