Catastrophic as things seem, I do have just a soupçon of wonky optimism. How many seemingly intractable crises have come and gone in the last 25 years? Remember Rwanda, and the whole maelstrom of African conflicts in its wake? Rwanda couldn’t happen again but then there was Darfur. When did Iraq stop being on the front page? Two years of desert plagues of insects were yesterday’s news when the Indian Ocean tsunami came along. Then there was Boko Haram in Nigeria, earthquakes in Haiti, famine in Southern Sudan. In case the dawning of the Arab Spring left us feeling a little optimistic, the protracted catastrophe of Syria unfolded. Ebola was quickly forgotten when we had Covid to worry about. It just goes on and on - the refugee crisis, Myanmar, the ebbing and flowing of the pink tide in South America, Trump, Afghanistan, Partygate. Just when we thought our heads would burst with it all- Vladimir Putin gave us in the West the crisis of all crises, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The editors cleared the decks and held the front page to bring us the news of misery and destruction, death and desolation. It seemed almost bad taste to mention the impact all this was having on our cost of living and energy prices.
The truth is we never see it coming, and then we wake up one morning, scratch our heads and wonder where it went. Of course, often ‘it hasn’t gone anywhere’. The media just decides it’s time to move on, relying on the ‘butterfly’ brains of the readers to go along with that. I have such admiration for the campaigners and journalists who go on working tirelessly to keep these issues in the public eye when they have ceased to be ‘fashionable’. Now it’s much easier to move on from crises in other parts of the world. When we are faced with a catastrophe right here at home, and one with a devastating impact on people’s lives, you can’t just make it go away by not reporting on it anymore. If the energy price crisis can be avoided or even contained, it will not be as a result of short term Government help but changes on a global scale. When will that happen? Will it happen? I don’t know, the media doesn’t know. But if it does, the editor will be ready to change the front page and tell us all about the next crisis we face.