Monday, May 10, 2021

Why I haven't said anything about Palestine.

With the whole world up in arms about Palestine (no need to link anything, you can just read it anywhere), I have been totally silent about the issue. Why? You might ask. Well, for a long time I have been the proponent of the idea that tags and social media do not solve much (remember how effective #bringourgirlsback campaign was? Not much actually). You know it is easy to post on Facebook between zoom meetings or whatsapp discussions about this or that, and flood social media with sentiments: But apart from the feeling that you have cleaned your conscience and engaged in an act of slacktivism, tell me - what else did you do?

All right,  I can see your point already: You are running a blog, supposedly for the betterment of the advertising industry, so how does that differ? It differs that for 15 years I taught at master's level at universities, worked on future generations of advertisers, was very harsh when it came to ethics, tried to instill in them - not just methods of creativity - but also deep entrenched values. It also means that advertisers (and here I know how little that effect can be in real life) were less enthusiastic to copy (read that steal) other people's ideas knowing they will get caught and exposed and ridiculed (usually this is under "compare and contrast" on this blog).

Oh, and last week, mother had a health scare. The kind of health scare that in the past would lead her to a hospital stay. She was adamant she did not want to go. So the Chemaly boys worked hand in hand to stabilize the situation. And it worked. But of course me being the resident of the house, there was extra duties to perform and things to do. So all this was time consuming, and me being me, I had to remain calm and steady and ever-efficient. So honestly this was priority over an issue (i.e. Palestine) I had no control or influence on.

I do care about what is happening there, but also am trying not to be a hypocrite and just do things which are ethically pseudo-meaningless.