Knowing enough to fly a flag

It should be an uncontroversial statement to say that most people simply don’t know enough to speak knowledgeably about most things.

And it should be an almost yawn-inducing banality to say that each and every one of us should be extremely hesitant to form strong and strident opinions about most complex, divisive and deadly issues.

The world is complicated, people are busy and easily confused, and our time is precious and finite.

Therefore, at every moment of our life, whether we are aware of it or not, we are ceaselessly faced with the life-defining task of choosing what to give our attention to and what to ignore.

We often talk about ‘paying attention’ to things, and the phraseology here is no accident, because there is certainly a cost to paying attention to one thing, and that is the infinite number of other things that we are implicitly, de-facto deciding to ignore. But there is simply no other way it can be. That is just what it is to be a conscious creature with a limited lifespan.

Even for the miraculous multi-tasking marvel that is the homo sapien female, simultaneous thinking is virtually impossible, and, despite what your mother, sister and girlfriend would have you believe, nobody can really do two complex things at once.

You can’t read a book about the politics and socioeconomic history of Afghanistan, whilst at the same time planning what you’ll have for your dinner.

You can’t pay proper attention to the trials and tribulations and tennis table tournaments of Forest Gump, whilst also being absorbed by the guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix.

And you can’t dedicate your whole life to your family, work, football and films, and still have time and brain-space left over to keep up a comprehensive understanding of every major event that is unfolding across the globe.

In one way, we get to choose what we care about. In another, the things that matter to us select themselves.

Anyway, this week my mind has been drawn in this direction because of the way many people in the North have reacted to the war which has re-erupted between Israel and Palestine.

In a land that could not be more foreign to most local people, a terrible, deep, complex conflict has once again caught fire.

Israel has killed thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians.

Hamas has killed over 1,000 innocent Israelis, and taken hundreds of normal people hostage, either to use as human shields or as bargaining chips in a morally bankrupt game of political poker.

Meanwhile, in towns and villages across the county, the colours of each country have been hoisted high into the sky, as people feel compelled – for both genuine and less than genuine reasons – to show their support for one side or the other.

Without getting bogged down in the imperfect political and historical parallels that go some way to explaining why people here feel so impassioned by what is happening between Israel and Palestine, I think it is fair to say that most local partisans who have expressed their unqualified solidarity with either side are doing so on the basis of an incomplete understanding of the situation.

That is not to say that their motivations are not decent, their opinions not held in good faith, or that their allegiances might not in time turn out to be morally just.

However, I look at them and wonder if they know enough to pick a side in a war that will see so much innocent bloodshed.

On the other hand, though, apartheid was abolished in South Africa partly because of international support for Mandela’s South African Communist Party. The voice of the black civil rights movement in America was amplified by solidarity groups across the globe.

And, on our own doorstep, the civil rights movement of the 1960s benefited greatly from support and aid by the outside world.

However, Israel-Palestine is a complex and confusing war with a history that exceeds my understanding, and this most recent unrest looks set to see the blood of thousands more civilians spilled.

For now, I personally do not feel like I know enough to fly a flag.

But, here, and I mean this without being sarcastic or glib, maybe you do.