Yesterday was the day of colorful status updates on facebook. Women posted the color of their bra to raise awareness of breast cancer. 9 days ago Lhasa de Sela died of breast cancer at age 37. Now that makes me blue.
Perhaps it is befitting to start my musings with a note on polar bears. It is a particularly cold day in Germany. Snow storm Daisy keeps an icy grip on the country.
On my mind is the picture of a polar bear that lies down to die. He is dying next to a colony of walrusses due to exhaustion and starvation in one of the last scenes from the movie Earth. Polar bears have become an icon for the effects of global warming. Seeing this big bear struggle on ice that was too thin to walk on and to thick to swim in, and seeing him die later makes me understand why polar bears are a powerful icon.
I tend to be skeptic towards the use of icons. The critic in me says, “too cheesy, too cheap a trick to get people’s attention”. Yet I have no doubt that a picture can say more than many words, and that most people tend to be more moved by a story than by sober facts. So maybe the problem doesn’t lie with the “cheap trick” but with the fact that we seem to need it? Maybe the root cause is a lack of attention. Or why else are we so close (20 years) to the extinction of polar bears living in the wild?
But on second thought I am wondering whether it is the kind of attention that we bring that is problematic, not the lack of attention. Remember Knut? The pampered polar baby bear in Berlin did not suffer from a lack of attention. To the contrary – he was a million-dollar business due to the attention he got (before he turned into a pubescent polar bear). It is just that reality isn’t quite as cute as Knut.
