The Backyard Effect

By Tolu Olorunda

What is the Backyard Effect? The Backyard effect as I refer to it, is the act of expressing indifference and insouciance to the calamities of other folks, until the decency and sanity of your home front or personal life is threatened by those same casualties.

Several recent events, and the unconventional moral outrage surrounding them, have revealed to me that our society is suffering from a severe case of “Backyard Effectitis.” In this piece, I hope to encourage, stimulate, challenge and confront the mind into paying critical deference to the hazards and mishaps that hunt the lives of everyday citizens and non-citizens. 

The backyard effect has subconsciously infected our sensibility, and the below-listed events reinforce my apprehension:

• That it took countless incidents of nooses being hung around the nation, to awaken a bitterly-required debate about the undermined and subordinated conditions of black-folks in this country.
• That only after a Don Imus’s sexist rant, was the issue of female-inequality being raised and brought to the table of discussion.
• That the slow and morally-reprehensible response to the victims of Hurricane Katina, was the straw that broke the camel’s back, in the need for a candid discourse about classism, and the mistreatment of the financially challenged.
• That only after the sudden occurrences of college-shooting rampages, did the case for gun-control and domestic-violence receive some much needed illumination.
• That the current nation-wide economical-shakedown was the sole resultant-factor, in the neoteric engagement of issues pertaining to wealth and the accumulation of it. 

All of the aforementioned incidents have issues of dire-concern predating their origin. The reality however, is that our convenience, is mostly prioritized to avoid the strain of lending a useful ear to the plights and travails of the everyday human-being. Our inability to keep track of the humanity of each and every “person” has ultimately cost us dearly.

We are now officially living in the most narcissistic, hedonistic, individualistic and megalomaniac historical period ever. The only remedy for our sickly society is an admission of our pathological error, and a deliberate effort to right our past-wrongs by asserting ourselves into a mode, that entertains the Samaritanship-doctrine preached by Jesus Christ and Muhammad.

Peace!

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