Forget the silly season – the news never stops in August

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/07/forget-silly-season-news-never-stops-in-august

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Well done on reading this far. Face it: it’s August, you’ve enough to think about already, the news isn’t getting any better, and it’s time for a holiday. “The world is too much with us,” as Wordsworth said. Why wouldn’t any sane person just want to tune out and switch off?

But no, your conscience objects. Ignoring suffering and calamity is not a moral choice. It would simply be a selfish act of denial. How can you go and frolic at the seaside when innocent children are being killed? And this is what they call the silly season.

Except that a quick look at the historical calendar will tell you that August has often been a month of dramatic and utterly unsilly activity. Tanks have rolled – into Prague in 1968 and into Kuwait in 1990. Forty years ago this week Richard Nixon resigned as US president. Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech in August 1963. There was an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. In August 1969 British troops were sent into Northern Ireland. We are currently marking the centenary of “the guns of August” – the start of the first world war. And in August 2007 the French bank BNP Paribas halted trading in three of its hedge funds that were operating in the US sub-prime mortgage market. The financial crisis had begun.

Exhaustion, whether physical or emotional, is a natural consequence of the past few years of economic turbulence. The crisis has, I think, taken a much greater toll than many in business and finance realise, or are able to admit to themselves. (The impact on the rest of us has been more obvious.) Even now it is not over, with markets nervous about the coming withdrawal of central bank support.

Wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine are the violent complement to this flow of already troubling news. Any attempt to take refuge in social media is doomed – there, friends and acquaintances share their anger and distress over world events. The pictures, reports and video clips are everywhere.

This is a paradox of early 21st-century life. We seem to be better connected and better informed than ever before. And yet as individuals we can feel almost powerless to do anything about the impossibly difficult situations that are constantly viewable on our amazing array of gadgets. We can go into a TV studio and shout at politicians for a bit, or slag them off to opinion pollsters, and this may temporarily relieve some of the stress. But it has zero effect on the cause of all the upset.

Marches, tweets, blogs, articles and broadcasts add to the noise. But do they achieve anything? Even an established, mainstream figure such as Jon Snow feels forced to step outside the usual structure of a formal news bulletin to make a personal statement on Gaza. Activity, at least, is better than despair or violent anger.

I am reminded of a scene in the Paddy Chayefsky-scripted film The Hospital (1971), in which George C Scott, playing the part of a senior doctor called Herbert Bock, howls at his own sense of uselessness and impotence. “We have established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived and people are sicker than ever,” he screams. “We cure nothing. We heal nothing. The whole goddamn wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes.” But by the end of the movie, Bock accepts this daunting paradox and goes back in to work.

That is our sisyphean task this August: not to be overwhelmed; to try to avoid giving in to despair; and to resist the temptation to hide from the appalling scenes being broadcast into our living rooms. We should remain engaged and thoughtful, and not shut out the truth. But perhaps a modern-day Sisyphus would also be allowed a short break, a temporary release from the eternal stone-rolling. Those of us fortunate enough to be able to go away on a peaceful holiday should do so, and not feel guilty about it. We need it. And well done for reading this far.