Willfully Ignorant

A few years ago when the ladies in my Sunday school class were competing to see who read the news the least I thought they were a bit crazy. I believed, and still do, in being informed about what’s going on in the world, not only locally, not focusing on a single situation, but provincially, nationally, and world wide. I felt that their choosing not to know, meant that they missed a huge opportunity to broaden their horizons and expand their world view and understanding of other people.

I know for a fact that some of the loudest proponents for staying off the internet for the sake of one’s peace of mind no longer hold so tightly to that belief. Some of these same women have also been the loudest proponents of pandemic born conspiracies they read on the internet. They’re not the only ones I have changed my viewpoint as well, only in the opposite direction. It’s strange how time and pandemics do that. 

It’s something I’ve only noticed in myself recently; it hasn’t been a fully conscious change. Maybe it’s been a subconscious way of indulging the avoidance part of my personality and protecting myself and this bébé inside me from extra anxiety and worry. Do you know what [insert name of prominent revolutionary] did today ? Have you heard latest on [insert pandemic drama / political movement]? Do you know about [current war] ? Don’t you read [insert blog name here] ? That’s a no to all of the above.  I have and still do love a good political discussion / debate.  I’m mostly uneducated but no less opinionated. I’ve also turned into a second hand information kind of girl whose vocabulary includes a lot of phrases like My husband says and My brother told me and I heard my mil say. 

I’m here for not knowing everything. It’s okay to not know all the details of every European war. Not because we don’t sympathize or care, but because there are a lot of other problems in this world that we care about, too.

For me, I want to know about every situation. The details I need to know are the less reported, less political humanitarian sides of the unrest and natural disasters dominating the news cycles, or, more often, not dominating the news cycles. Thousands of refugees, almost half of them children and a high number of girls and women, have been displaced from their homes as violence, volcanos and climate change continue to surge  across huge swaths of Africa including Somalia, Ethiopia, DRC, Nigeria, and Sudan. All this has been going down while I obliviously scroll through recipes trying to get cooking inspiration and debate different baby paraphernalia on Amazon. The global pandemic has impacted the world in more ways than I realized: it’s caused a dramatic spike in poverty and starvation worldwide, reversing the consistent downward trend of poverty in the past two decades. In South America, on top of an extraordinarily high rate of virus deaths, hunger rates have risen unequivocally in  in the last 2 years. And right here, pandemic related drama has strained the family relationships and emotional and mental health of a friend sitting beside me in church.

So I’m willfully ignorant in ways I choose to be, such as what our prime minister said yesterday or the status of one specific war no one can stop talking about. Do politics actually matter in comparison to the Human side of things?  Instead, I’m trying to use my heart rather than my brain when it comes to life and human suffering. I’m letting my heart break for hungry toddlers in refugee camps all over Northern Africa as I sit with a guiltily full stomach and listen to my congregation sing “I am sending you to the war torn lands…where the people cry as the sun goes down for the want of a piece of bread…” I’m going to go visit my ancient neighbour who has had a very depressing and difficult winter for real instead of just thinking about it. I’ll intentionally  keep my heart open to the words and feelings of the women surrounding me in the church benches after Bible Study tonight instead of focusing on myself.