Obviously I didn’t take any of these Casanovas seriously. But I did appreciate a culture where people were more forward and expressive in their everyday interactions. When I walked to the subway from my apartment in Brooklyn, I’d often get a few “hellos” and “good mornings” from my neighbours. It was so unlike London, where people do as much as they can to avoid interacting with strangers. So when the women in my office discussed a catcalling video that went viral, expressing their disgust at all the fat slobs who hurled sexually explicit comments at them on the streets, I weighed in with my own “refreshing” opinion — patiently explaining to my sceptical-looking colleagues that, actually, it was quite nice to interact with your fellow New Yorkers.

But I’ve had a change of heart. On a recent Sunday, I got onto a subway car heading to lower Manhattan. A youngish guy sitting diagonally opposite from me said “Hey baby,” or something just as cheesy. I wasn’t in the mood to chat, so I ignored him and carried on reading my book. A minute later, he tried it on again. Again, I ignored him. But then he started yelling. “You f–king bitch!” he shouted. “I was just trying to be nice, you f–king whore!” My fellow passengers were all suddenly hiding behind magazines and books, steadfastly ignoring what was going on around them. How very British of them, I thought. It got even worse. My “admirer” started spitting — first, about a yard away from I was sitting, and then getting closer and closer. When the subway car rolled into a station, I leapt off, traumatised. Since then, I’ve been groped in Times Square and received an unsolicited massage from a male passenger on another subway car. When I said it was fun to interact with New Yorkers, I’m not sure this is what I had in mind.

The post Close Encounters appeared first on Standpoint.

But in the New Yorker, the contrarian writer Malcolm Gladwell has dared to doubt the power of internet activism — or “clicktivism”, “wiki-activism”, etc — arguing that the revolution will not be Tweeted. Citing the example of the American civil rights movement, Gladwell argues that the activism of effective protests like the Greensboro anti-segregation sit-ins of 1960, which eventually involved 70,000 students, relied on personal connections and shared experiences. You don’t take the sort of risks involved in political protests, especially in countries like Iran, with a Twitter contact or a Facebook friend whom you might not even have met; you take them with strong ties, such as family and close friends. Gladwell also targets the counter-productiveness of a social network’s celebrated feature — its lack of hierarchy. This is wonderful in low-risk situations, because it means that Wikipedia and its like can be resilient and adaptable. But to have influence in high-risk political situations activists need leaders who are able to stop a peaceful sit-in from turning into a violent protest that could compromise the whole movement.     

Sorkin, when talking about the research conducted into The Social Network and the personalities involved in the creation of Facebook, was struck by the irony of a socially awkward man like Mark Zuckerberg (who co-founded Facebook) creating the world’s most important social networking device since the telephone. A man who, as Sorkin put it, had “his nose pressed up against the window of social life” at Harvard would end up with 500 million friends. But how strong can these ties be, and how real are these friendships? 

That’s the whole problem with cyber-activism: the virtual world rarely corresponds directly to the real world. So you can feel as if you’re creating friendships and spending more time socialising with people, when actually you’re probably spending less time in the real world. And just so with political activism: you feel as if you’re participating in movements if you follow a political group on Facebook or Tweet about environmentalism and the budget cuts, but you don’t take action in the real world. You often do less, having already assuaged any guilt by doing something minor but worthy online. 

The political theorist Michael Walzer asked the students involved in sit-ins what the atmosphere was like: “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go’,” he wrote in his book Dissent. The key feature about cyber-politics seems to be that if you can catch political activism like a fever, it spreads much more quickly online: if the civil rights movement had been organised online, Martin Luther King would have gained thousands of followers within hours. However, the fever isn’t as lasting or as potent, so these followers won’t necessarily translate to participants in sit-ins. Cyber-activism is more like a 24-hour bug — a temporary shock to the system, but not life-changing.

The post A Fever that Doesn’t Last appeared first on Standpoint.

All three articles are authored or co-authored by women. So not only are women condemned to reading misogynist rubbish, but apparently they’re condemned to writing it too. And commenting on women purely in terms of their breast size, leg length, fertility and fashion choices is bad enough when actresses and singers are the targets, but is lamentable when it becomes the habitual way of assessing women who work in business and politics. Fewer than 20 per cent of MPs are women, and it’s unsurprising given the way they are treated by the press, who casually refer to them by their bed-ability or style rather than their political judgment. Before Jacqui Smith got caught up in rows over expenses and porn videos, she was consistently referenced via the depths of her neckline. In more cases than not, an article about Theresa May will have a tenuous link to a pair of kitten heels. Being Home Secretary is not, it seems, enough to make the media take a woman seriously. 

There’s a new feminist force for good on Twitter, associated with the Women’s Media Centre (@womensmediacntr), an American organisation which seeks to empower women and promote diversity in the media. 

They have just launched a “Name It Change It” campaign that aims to fight the sexism in the media that female political candidates are faced with when they run for office. You can follow their tweets at @nameitchangeit. They recently looked at a Vanity Fair article about Sarah Palin from the October issue, which showed an unhealthy interest in her Spanx girdles and push-up bras. They are now focusing on the November mid-terms, and have asked people to report any unfair coverage to them. 

They have also published a “Pyramid of Egregiousness” on their website www.nameitchangeit.org with three categories of sexist vocabulary that people should pick up on and criticise: Just Plain Sexist (Sweetheart, Bossy, Emotional); Really Damn Sexist (PMS, Nagging, Shrill); and Severe Misogyny (Man-Eater, Whore, Milf). 

I’d bet that to some extent Sarah Palin is happy to exaggerate her sexuality and use it as an aggressive political tool against the men that make up the majority of the political sphere, as many women tend to — it can work, after all. But surely women such as Palin, Smith and May deserve as much serious political criticism as the men do. 

Do we really want a woman making it to the White House just because she chooses the right lipstick? 

The post What Women (Don’t) Want appeared first on Standpoint.

The freedom of information website published the documents leaked from the American armed forces in conjunction with the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel. Since then, the controversial website and its Bond villain lookalike founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange have been criticised. The leaked sensitive intelligence includes previously unreported details of friendly fire incidents, civilian casualties, Afghan informants and the suspected involvement of Pakistan and Iran in the insurgency, which could, said the Pentagon, jeopardise the safety of Nato and Afghan troops. The Times reported that the names of informants and their fathers, their villages, tribes and GPS co-ordinates for their homes had been published. These were men such as “[named person who] wanted to help us as much as possible…[but] they were afraid that the people in the next village would see them talking to Americans.” This led to the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, stating in a press conference that Assange “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier”.

Five human-rights organisations, including Amnesty International and the Open Society Institute, joined in the criticism because of their concern for the safety of Afghans named in the documents.

Assange has indeed cast the leak, and the role of WikiLeaks in general, as pivotal in achieving the “greater good”, even if some individuals are endangered along the way. He wants people to be able to assess their country’s role in the Afghanistan war with all the facts in their grasp: “You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere.”

He compares himself favourably with those journalists and media magnates who think of profit above principle when filling their pages, and the motivation is a good one. After all, the purpose of news providers should be to inform the public of things that are in its interest to know. And this isn’t necessarily going to be the same kind of material that makes a profit. But people such as Assange should be cautious about taking the moral high ground — the fall from there is much greater than for those who just chase the buck.

Wikipedia and WikiLeaks have a lot in common. They are both open and self-monitoring databases that operate on the idea that everyone and everything is fair game in the search for what they call truth, but what is actually just transparency. To get at the truth of the Afghanistan war, and whether it is worth it, one would have to see both sides of the story. And this transparency often comes at the cost of someone’s privacy — something Sarah Palin found out when WikiLeaks published her emails from her personal account. To Assange, privacy is an accomplice to conspiracy, and should always be violated to shine a light on the lives of those in power.

The internet has certainly changed journalism. But whether or not Assange’s crusade is the right one, he still relies on those profit-seeking media magnates who recognised that the war log would sell a lot of papers and who condensed the 91,000 documents into something that people would read. 

The post Speaking Truth to Power? appeared first on Standpoint.

Despite suffering from what sounds like a heart attack on hearing the news, and spending that same night continuously dreaming of death, Carlyle resolutely set about writing a new first volume the next day. Six months later, he had completed “the ugliest task ever set”, and by 1837 the two-volume work was finished: a project which Carlyle claimed had come “as near to choking the life out of me as any task I should like to undertake for some years to come”. 

Dr Ruth Scurr’s introduction to Continuum’s new edition of the history helps us to relive the weeping, praying and exhaustion that Carlyle experienced as he produced what Scurr calls one of the finest examples of English prose ever. 

Fast-forward 170 years to another weeping author, Stephenie Meyer, famous for penning the Twilight Saga — the addictive and sickeningly romantic vampire series that is perhaps not one of the finest examples of English prose but nonetheless is prose that has sold more than 100 million books. Her pain has the opposite source: rather than suffering from the lack of a manuscript, she found that too many copies existed and for all to see on the internet. Meyer was in the middle of writing Midnight Sun, a companion to Twilight from the vampire Edward Cullen’s point of view, when the partial draft was leaked online. She has abandoned the project out of frustration that the uncompleted and uncorrected version has been read by her fans without her permission. She also feared that if she tried to write it in her current frame of mind she would end up killing off all the characters.

Meyer was justifiably angry that people across the world had shared an item that didn’t legally belong to them. But possession is a fuzzy concept when it comes to the internet. 

Many internet users stick to the squatter’s rights defence that possession is nine-tenths of the law — if it’s in your hands, then it’s yours. This is quite a crafty justification, because in the virtual world you can’t physically get your hands on anything. 

The internet has transformed publishing so that dilemmas like Carlyle’s now seem impossible. Most authors write their books on a computer, save their work to hard disk, back it up, and email it to close friends or the publishers. And Carlyle’s spirit can rest easy in the knowledge that even if every existing copy of his book were to go up in flames, he would still have the e-book. Unfortunately, as Meyer found out, the advantages of new technology have corresponding disadvantages, greater opportunities for privacy violation being one. 

But both these authors — despite having lived very different lives and written very different books — actually suffered from the same old problem in the end: human carelessness, whereby a maid accidentally burns your magnum opus, or a friend stupidly forwards an email to the wrong person. No technology can cater for that. 

The post Save, Save and Save Again appeared first on Standpoint.

Not content with ending presidential term limits via a referendum in February 2009 so that he can now govern for ever and ever (and he says he’ll need at least another ten years for the socialist revolution to “take root”), Chávez also feels that it’s necessary to bombard his electorate with quality Hugo time through every medium available. 

Venezuelans already have the option to say “Aló Presidente” every Sunday by watching his live chat show of the same name, which regularly tips over the seven-hour mark and once included a six-minute description of the time he had an attack of diarrhoea while giving a speech. And if that doesn’t satisfy their Hugo needs, then they also have the good fortune to wake up to Suddenly with Chávez, a radio venture of his which can take to the air at any hour, and which has previously included him warbling presidential songs, ad lib. 

Now — presumably concerned that people would be daunted by all that free time — Chávez has taken to Twitter, the social networking site that operates every minute of the day. Lucky Venezuelans. 

Chávez hasn’t always expressed affection for Western technology. In January, he attacked the Sony PlayStation as “poison”, arguing that violent computer games teach you to kill and are a powerful tool to promote weapons sales by capitalist countries. 

However, given the popularity of Twitter in Venezuela, where growth exceeded 1,000 per cent in the last year, Chávez would have been foolish to ignore the opportunities it presents — especially with his lowest approval rating for seven years, at 45 per cent down from 70 per cent three years ago. So at the end of April he opened an account under the name of Chávezcandanga (candanga means daring or rebellious in Venezuelan Spanish). By the next morning he had 25,000 followers and at the time of writing he is the most-followed tweeter in Venezuela, with more than 300,000 followers. This is 21st-century revolutionary e-socialism at its finest. Lenin and Trotsky would have loved it: the proletariat just a BlackBerry screen and 140 characters away from being roused into breaking their capitalist chains. 

But Chávez’s Twitter debut does make you wonder what we should expect from these influential internet services. The Venezuelan government has a dubious human rights record, has been known to curtail freedom of expression, leans heavily on the judiciary and intimidates political opponents. And yet, through Twitter, Chávez can flex his skills as a talented communicator to consolidate his own power, as he has through the television and radio. 

But what would we expect of the corporation if someone with an even worse record, like Robert Mugabe, decided to join up? Unlikely as that may be, it does illustrate the uncomfortable position in which these businesses find themselves. 

Maybe we should leave it up to the tweeters themselves, who have past form in blowing up storms about various injustices across the world — that is, if they can tear themselves away from electoral reform and Wayne Rooney’s groin injuries. 

The post Viva la e-revolución! appeared first on Standpoint.

Eagleton starts his book with this case for the same reason that I’ve started the review with it — because we both know that it makes our writing infinitely more interesting. Because the thing that sells almost as much as sex is evil. Because Huntley and Carr, Hindley and Brady, Venables and Thompson are all sure things when it comes to a good news story, even years after the crime. (In the last few months, both Huntley and Venables have graced the front pages of the papers.) There is something about evil that absolutely enthrals us — even more so if it involves women or children — and there is something terrifyingly thrilling about the thought that there are monsters, psychopaths and sadists in our midst. On Evil is laced with these villains and anti-heroes, both real and fictional, and automatically becomes much more absorbing because of this: Pinkie, in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, with his “slatey eyes…touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went”; the nihilist Iago, who seeks to destroy the angelic pompousness of Othello; even Satan himself, who cries “Evil, be thou my good!” in Paradise Lost. 

We classify such killers as monsters in order to separate them from the merely wicked, and to separate them from ourselves. After all, life would be pretty unbearable if we were to believe that evil was commonplace or something that we could all succumb to in the right circumstances. Evil has to be a category on its own, that exists above and beyond understandable human behaviour. 

Eagleton is out to spoil this illusion that we’ve created for ourselves, arguing that evil isn’t as mysterious or incomprehensible as we may like to believe.

A police officer involved in the investigation of Jamie Bulger’s murder said that the moment he clapped eyes on one of the culprits he knew he was evil. Eagleton sees this as a “pre-emptive strike against soft-hearted liberals”, a ploy to secure full punishment for the boys by arguing that their actions were without rhyme or reason and couldn’t be explained away by looking into Thompson’s and Venables’s backgrounds. Evil people are therefore evil by nature, not nurture, and must be punished as such. They are like it from birth, like Kevin in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, who, to some, displays sociopathic tendencies even as a baby. Unfortunately, this is a circular argument: if someone is evil by nature then they can’t really help who they are and what they do and are, perversely, innocent. They have been born with a disease or psychosis. 

These circular arguments are symbolically important — the endless cycle of evil, guilt and self-loathing, the witches of Macbeth who live in cyclical time, who dance in circles and follow moon cycles, all help to represent the futile and constant nature of evil in our lives. Time isn’t linear so that one day we’ll progress past evil — time is cyclical, so that evil is always with us. Eagleton wishes to break this cycle and dispel the myth of evil as a “fixed ontological feature of the human condition”. It’s not that people are evil and there’s nothing we can do about it, or that people are innocent because their circumstances have forced them into evil acts. It’s understanding that evil can exist and still be explainable. 

In On Evil, Eagleton relies on Freud for an explanation, arguing that the modern age has witnessed a transition from traditional religious explanations of evil to psychoanalytical theories. Instead of the soul, we have the psyche; theology becomes psychoanalysis; original sin is now identified as repression. And with the Freudian explanation, evil is all about death. In each of us there is a deadly yet delightful drive to destruction, a “malignly sadistic force”, as Eagleton puts it, a drive to absolute nothingness, an “orgiastic revolt against meaning”. Many of us are able to keep this death drive under control, but for those who are deficient in the art of living this becomes impossible, and we seek meaning in sadism or masochism. Aristotle said that living is something you get good at over time, but if you grow up without love, comfort and security, without friends and relatives who will bring value to your life, then the art of living might be a skill that you never acquire. If your life is terrible enough to create a “raging hatred against one’s own existence” then the desire to prove that life indeed has no value by ruining another’s can take over. So many — though of course, not all — people that we would consider evil, including Venables, Thompson and the Edlington boys, have grown up in this kind of environment. When criticising the social conditions that exist under capitalism, Eagleton almost classifies evil as a political ill, as something that wouldn’t exist in a socialist utopia. 

However, this “almost” is important. He argues that most people who commit horrific acts are actually wicked, rather than evil, because of their social background. Evil, he believes, must go above and beyond purely vicious acts. It does, indeed, have some kind of mystery to it. And so again we’re pulled back into the circular argument — one that Eagleton promised to release us from without having to use arguments that involve religion or senseless monsters, but one that his politics does not go far enough to overcome. 

It’s unsurprising that On Evil is a confused and somewhat vague book. After all, it is written by a Christian Marxist who must always be attempting to reconcile his Christianity with a political ideology that denounces religion while promoting its own dogmatic creed. It’s compelling purely for its subject matter and Eagleton’s language and examples are always inventive — until he throws in a bit of Texas-bashing here and there, which is both boring and predictable. His final thoughts on terrorism are extraordinary in their inability to come to some kind of conclusion, Eagleton being so torn between wanting to recognise immoral acts without condemning them: this is symptomatic of the whole book. But most striking is the question that On Evil presents to us, which is the very question that Eagleton wanted to tackle. How does one explain evil without the help of God and Satan, or a few monsters here and there? If we all have a death drive within us, why is it that some of us can’t contain it? If it’s not only about social background, then what does determine it? 

As a secular person who doesn’t want to dismiss all evil acts as those committed by deranged and incomprehensible psychopaths, what am I supposed to believe? We, the readers, have come full circle. Is pure chance the only thing an atheist has to break these cycles of evil?

The post Satanic Masters appeared first on Standpoint.

Venue: First Televised Leaders’ Debate, Manchester/your laptop/your TV

Twitter build-up:

Nick Clegg (LibDem leader): Just having a first look at the studio for this evening’s debate. Nervous and excited? Absolutely.

Iain Dale (Tory campaigner): Every undecided voter I’ve called on this pm is watching the debate tonight. Democracy in action and proof that the debates are a good idea

Fairy_poo (Random member of public): Check out #LeadersDebate. You’ll find only 2 kinds of people: Those who don’t give a shit, and those who REALLY give a shit.

And they’re off:

Johnprescott (Deluded): Tonight you’re seeing the real Gordon I know. Funny, intelligent and a man of real substance.

Hugo Rifkind (Columnist for The Times): Gordon looks like he died 8 mins ago and they just restarted his heart.

All: Is Gordon Brown wearing lipstick?

Twodoctors (Green candidate): If Dave is C3PO made out of ham, Gordo looks like Darth Vader when his helmet comes off. Clegg a shaved Ewok.

Higgis (random member of public): Please, someone ask a question about prostitution. Dave: “I actually went to a brothel the other day”

Alex Massie (Spectator): Ah, this is the bit in which we all boast about how great the NHS is while demonstrating how, in fact, it is crap.

Paul Waugh (Evening Standard): Can’t wait for Clegg to say “I agree with Nick…Oh Christ, I AM Nick…”

Reelmolesworth (Random drunk): masters hav a drinking game with 1 tot from the bot when grabber cameron sa job tax. all are now INSENSIBEL

Aftermath:

Benedict Brogan (Telegraph): Debate verdict: Brown scrabbles to survive, Cameron stays calm and Clegg gets the cream

Guidofawkes (Blogger): Quote of the Day: David Laws said… “There were low expectations for Gordon Brown and he failed to live up to them…

Johnprescott (Still deluded): Substance beats style EVERY time. Solid win for Gordon! 

Vital Statistics:  

36,483 people tweeted 184,396 tweets (three times the number tweeted during Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time), at a rate of 39 tweets per second, amounting to 5.4 per cent of all tweets at the time. Peak of 9.9 million TV viewers, averaging 9.4 million (less than the Doctor Who episode the week before and about half of the last X Factor Final’s viewing figures).

Verdict: 

More than 250 times more people watched the debate than tweeted about it, and considering that the people tweeting were tweeting about old media anyway, it has to be the winner. But if you want to be cheesy about it, than the winner was, in fact, the electorate.

The post Democracy in Action appeared first on Standpoint.

Out of the 27,000 people surveyed across 26 countries for the BBC World Service, 87 per cent of those with the internet say that access is a fundamental right, and 70 per cent without it want access. The internet is now regarded as a basic element of the infrastructure, along with roads, water and waste removal. Unfortunately, this comes at a time when, as the Queen warned in her Commonwealth Day message, being online is “an unaffordable option” for too many. 

At some point, the freedom to surf became vital to the social contract. And this has larger consequences. Companies like Google can’t just operate as businesses. We begin to view them, perhaps unfairly, as guardians of this freedom. Which is why three Google executives in Milan were sentenced to six-month suspended jail terms over a cyber-bullying video posted by somebody else and which was taken down as soon as it was flagged up. Apparently, we expect Google to be the policeman of the web. 

This new “netizenship” has international consequences because of the internet’s global nature. China’s leaders are hoping that they can use the country’s online voice to compete for a greater say in global affairs. This comes at a time when China is trying to assert itself internationally: the Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, said at the Munich security conference in February that China “deserves a hearing of one kind or another. We have one fifth of mankind. At least we deserve a chance to express our views on how things should be run in the world.”

Unfortunately for their leaders, some 384 million Chinese netizens who help to make up one-fifth of mankind are expressing their views, just not through the leaders’ mouths. As China’s legislators gathered in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing for the annual National People’s Congress (NPC), an alternative e-congress, dealing with housing prices, education and the wealth gap, was being held in the virtual “Great Hall of the Netizens”. 

The Chinese take their duties as netizens very seriously, probably because they garner results. There isn’t much space between the virtual and real political worlds. In January, three netizens were named political advisers in Anhui Province, and in 2009 the authorities were forced to deal openly with three high-profile and unexplained criminal injustices that became internet sensations: the death of a 24-year-old prisoner, an accident in which a young pedestrian was killed by a car speeding through the streets of Hangzhou, and an entrapment scandal in Shanghai. Last month, a corrupt official was outed when his diary, which contained details of his various sexual dalliances and cash gifts, was leaked online. China’s leaders are beginning to comprehend the power of the internet. Tellingly, Premier Wen Jiabao didn’t take any questions from delegates after his speech to the NPC, yet dedicated two hours to an online question-and-answer session that elicited more than 60,000 questions. 

The e-congress and the online session with Mr Wen were, of course, tightly controlled affairs in which sensitive political issues were not discussed, and the interest that Chinese leaders show in the internet is one of self-interest. Yet it’s difficult to ignore 384 million voices. This freedom is essential, even if its results may challenge us: after all, the second most popular proposal at the e-congress was the extension of the death penalty to corrupt officials.

The post Netizens’ Rights appeared first on Standpoint.

Hence the slightly desperate obsession with the Iraq Inquiry displayed by many commentators determined to have the defining word on that day’s hearing: to highlight every Alastair Campbell yawn, Tony Blair hand spasm and Clare Short gaffe. Most striking of all was the anxious and sometimes embarrassing fixation with breaking news, even if there was none to break. For instance, when Campbell gave evidence at the inquiry, Paul Waugh of the London Evening Standard blogged: “The big new revelation from today’s Iraq Inquiry is the existence of a series of private letters from Tony Blair to George Bush…and that whenever anyone questioned whether these top secret ‘notes’ existed, Blair’s closest aides always became incredibly touchy.” But Campbell pointed out on his own blog the next day that these notes had been summarised in his diaries, in 2007. 

Then, when Blair and his new tan descended on Westminster again, the blogosphere and Twitter went crazy: there were 0.8 tweets per second on his attendance, and the volume of posts about him was nearly nine times higher than the daily average for news stories on local politics. The Guardian tweeted on everything, from what Blair was expected to say to an analysis of what he had said. Everyone was out to achieve the Holy Grail of Twitter: the retweet (when someone else shares your post with their own contacts and followers). 

Yet among the melodrama there was a certain flippancy that highlighted how introspective members of our media and politicians can be. While we prattled on about what Campbell had in his lunch sandwich, real news was being made in Iraq: the execution of Chemical Ali, the ban on candidates allegedly affiliated with the former Baath Party standing at the next election and the delay in the election itself. The blogs of Iraqis themselves provide personal insights that the news cannot. Here’s an excerpt from an Iraqi dentist’s blog explaining how he reacted to a bombing.

“I reached my car and started racing the wind…the closer to the house the more damage I was able to notice and more stressed the people in the street are. I reached home in a record time, I opened the car’s door and started running towards the house’s outer gate while I was looking at my home and I noticed that all the windows are broken and that’s when my legs couldn’t carry me anymore, I stumbled and fell on the floor, I rise again, started running and kicked the door…I opened the door and I started crying, I was crying the happiness tears. Just as I opened the door I saw my wife and daughter sitting on the couch and holding each other.”

The internet may have connected us to people across the world, yet it doesn’t seem to have brought us much perspective.

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