SEEMING TO DO GOOD IS ENOUGH
ELIN Ersson is the new poster girl of our debased times, when seeming good is more important than doing it.
Ersson’s Swedish activist group was rung last month by an Afghan family wanting help to stop the deportation to Afghanistan of their 26-year-old son, Ismail Khawari.
I doubt Ersson, 21, wondered whether Sweden might be right to reject Khawari’s refugee claim, given he’d lived safely for 20 years in Iran and Sweden is struggling to assimilate its big Muslim minority.
No, she just rushed to the airport to buy a ticket on the same flight — and to film herself stopping it, live on Facebook, heroine of her own movie.
But there was a hitch. On board, Ersson found not the handsome young Khawari, but a 52-year-old wife-beater being deported after time in jail.
Did she care? Ersson just whipped out her phone and livestreamed her refusal to sit down for takeoff until the wife-beater was removed.
She stormed and sobbed. She ignored the passengers begging her to sit down and the children who were crying. She was a bully.
“If he is deported to Afghanistan, he probably dies,” she insisted.
That’s false. Europe deported 10,000 Afghans in 2016 and Turkey sent back another 10,000 this year — all without reports of mass murder.
But who cares about facts? Not Ersson, declaring in a clip viewed a million times: “I’m doing what I can do to save a person’s life.”
The mainstream media was little bothered, either. The ABC decorated its report on Ersson’s successful stunt with tweets it scraped from the walls of the Twitter toilet. It didn’t matter how obscure or nasty the tweeter was, as long as they said what the Leftist ABC wanted.
So one tweet came from an obscure Dutch artist calling Ersson a “superhero”, and another from some Briton with just 227 followers calling a passenger who tried to stop her a “boot licking s--- head”.
Nor has the ABC since reported that Ersson “saved” a wife-basher. Why should it? In this age of seeming, it’s enough that Ersson seemed to do good, even though she didn’t.
Similarly, it’s enough that we seem to be saving the planet by stopping global warming, even though we aren’t. Enough that activists seem to be fighting fascists, when their violence shows they’re the real fascists.
So isn’t Ersson their perfect symbol?