Keep On Truckin’… (if Charlie Hebdo lived in Nigeria)

The recent terrorist attacks in Paris seem to have lit a spark in the commoners around the world to speak out against these acts of barbarism. The million-plus march in Paris and celebrity after celebrity speaking out about protecting our freedoms and standing up to the ISIS and Al-Qaida nutcases are popping up all around the globe.
Where are these righteous people when thousands, not a dozen, are slaughtered by the Boko Haram in North eastern Nigeria? Well, the City of Baga apparently doesn’t carry the importance of a city such as Paris, and thousands of poor villagers don’t add up to 12 journalists. How hypocritical are our reactions to these things, really? CNN, known as a worldwide news agency, gives minutes of coverage to the deaths of thousands, and days upon days of coverage over a dozen killed in Paris?
It appears that we, as North Americans, value our rich and privileged lives more than our impoverished and simple folks just going about daily life. It is easy to criticize and much harder to come up with solutions but we need to start somewhere. I revert back to the New Orleans floods when the US military couldn’t figure out how to get people off the rooftops when they have no trouble flying into Afghanistan in the middle of the night and entering Bin Laden’s home to kill him.
Our priorities on using our skills to gain political power rather than saving innocent lives are sadly misplaced. I write this to spark some thoughts in all of our minds about what is really important in life and where our loyalties should be and whom we should support in this journey of life. For me, I am fed up with CNN and its agenda to make ordinary, misguided, mentally-challenged folks into ISIS terrorists and give them some warped moment of fame and notoriety. We keep making it attractive and fashionable to be barbaric in our current media-starved world. I can choose to turn it off as my support in helping it stop. Your choice can help; make it wisely. Below is an interesting quote from a Nigerian Novelist.
“It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie