Watching Bojack Horseman at the End of the World

Bojack Horseman is a good animated show on Netflix. I watched it at 4am while food was going to waste in my fridge and pantry. Meanwhile, the Associated Press and the International Rescue Committee were splashing headlines across my news feed like, “UN says world faces largest humanitarian crisis since 1945,” and detailing how millions of children are malnourished and at serious risk of starvation and death, especially in South Sudan, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, and Kenya.

It’s surreal to be conscious of this and be lying on my couch watching Bojack Horseman. I donated $100 to the International Rescue Committee last week. What else can one person do? It is the constant conscientious citizen’s conundrum. No one can solve the world’s problems alone. There is no use in constantly monitoring your own every move and gauging whether or not what you are doing is contributing to making the world a better place. At the same time, South Sudanese children do not have the luxury of letting food rot, drinking Diet Sierra Mist and eating pretzels on the couch at 4am. They are counting on people in more privileged positions to take action to help. But what action? What organization can I meet with tomorrow that will bring about the change that will save the cholera-stricken South Sudanese child? There is no such organization. But some organizations are actively trying to help, so I donate money to them. I can also share stories on social media and encourage others to donate.

As far as how the comfortable westerner should regard the starving African child, the YouTube series Crash Course once wrestled with the quandary in its series on Philosophy. It used a thought experiment comfortably analogous to how most westerners probably regard the problem. If you walk by a lake and see a child drowning in the middle of the lake, do you have a moral obligation to help the child? It seems just about anyone made of remotely moral fiber would try to do their best to immediately save the child, whether that means swimming out to save them, or yelling for help, calling 911, something. It is an emergency and any moral person would try to help.

There is a crucial angle missing to the moral thought experiment, though: what if we bear some responsibility for the drowning child being in their predicament in the first place? Modern Africa is the product of a centuries-long history of colonial exploitation, plunder, and inexplicable boundary-drawing. I may not be actively trying to bring violence or starvation to the African children, but I am the beneficiary of an economic system that favors me and provides me with my position of comfort at the expense of the African. It is a manmade economic system. Each individual one of us may not be capable of changing it, but collectively we could. Every little failure to partake in the effort to change that system is a failure of the people who will be perpetually harmed by it.