There is just so many things to be outraged about in this stage of human history. What we really need is a global outrage ladder. Somewhere where all the outrageous issues of the day/week/month can be voted up and voted down. Kind of like Eurovision or American Idol but for important things.
Over the last say 12 months there have been various issues that have risen and fallen in outrageousness. The Chinese clamp down on Tibet. Zimbabwe’s ruling elite crippling the entire country. The Tamil Tigers using civilians as human shields. Sri Lanka killing civilians. Japan killing whales in the Antarctic ocean. Food shortages. Executive bonus’s. And the list just goes on and on.
I personally just watched SharkWater. A documentary film about Sharks and one mans quest to protect them. Protect them from illegal fishing, over fishing, and shark finning. Shark finning, has for me, just because I’ve just watched this movie, just gone straight to the top of my personal outrage list, displacing all other outrages.
10s of millions of sharks a year are caught, hauled on to boats, have their fins cut off, and then the carcass tossed overboard. It is so wasteful. So destructive to the oceans ecology. So irrational. So illogical that future generations will dig up our bones from our graves just so they can exact their revenge on our careless, heartless, selfish bone fragments. These fins all end up in Chinese restaurants and banquets. Which is ironic really because Chinese culture and the Confucian ethic is very much about filial piety. But let me tell you something my Chinese brothers and sisters. Your descendants will not be respecting you when they figure out you ate sharks into extinction and caused incalculable harm to the ocean’s ecology. These are creatures which have been around 400 million years, outlived the extinction of the dinosaurs and several other mass extinctions and yet we have, in the last 60 years or so, depleted their numbers by 90%. STOP EATING SHARK FINS!