Apparently Johnny Depp may or may not have been abusive towards his (female) partner. There’s rampant speculation over the matter. We’ve moved on from the immigration status of his dogs.
Columnists are bleeding words over the page by the thousands. Did he, or did he not? Who says he did? What did she? Is she a gold digger? Is even suggesting gold-digger status a crime toward all abused women? There’s a rampant overuse of the phrase ‘innocent until proved guilty’ but by now I’m not even sure who it’s meant to apply to: him, her, or a third party.
Why are we so eager to have an opinion on Johnny Depp’s romantic relationships, and theoretical rights and wrongs thereof? Whoever is to ‘blame’ or whatever the status is, I’m sure both parties are not going to end up too dreadfully off. They have lawyers a-plenty at their disposal. Let them get on with it. The public’s speculation does not one bit of good, though you’d think it does from the way columnists go on about it. ‘It’s an example.’ Is it? On hearsay and speculation?
It's precisely because there is NO consequence of the chatter. All sorts of proposals and theories can be bandied about with impunity, mostly in the delicious anonymity of the Net. Nothing need be done and there will be no repercussions. It’s a mix of window-shopping and soapboxing.
On the other hand, today I see in the (minor) news that Daesh in Mosul have burned 19 girls alive in steel cages because they refused to have sex with Daesh members. A smattering of comments, a few murmurs of how appalling it is. This, by contrast, is a situation that urgently needs broadcasting. Action. Public pressure. Right now, there are women (and humans in general) who have scant access to food, water or shelter, let alone lawyers, being set alight. I’d call that abuse. We are in a position to do something – be it vote, or organize aid packages, or send reporters, troops, medics.
But this is hard, and real. There’s no soft Deppish cushion, no background music of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’. There’s just people burning alive. We don’t want to deal with that.
Today one of my 11-year-olds came home saying they’d been studying history at school, and from the description it’s evidently a narrative about a WWII Jewish girl who ‘had to leave all her things, she had no possessions, she had to travel for months, she had no food, she was scared.’ Sounds familiar? While the Holocaust is not to be forgotten, I have yet to hear any of the kids come home with stories about our millions upon millions of modern-day refugees. The ones that are right here, right now. Along with the abused, voiceless men, women and children, who have no cameras pointing at them.
How harshly will the finger of history point at us?