Live8 Creates Awareness

Have you ever heard of a click exercise? It’s an action one uses to describe people dying, senselessly, in third world countries, for simple reasons, such as: extreme poverty, lack of clean water, malnutrition, and disease brought on by those problems. Essentially, the click exercise is completed by snapping your fingers in three second intervals. Each three second interval represents the loss of another human being due to a cause so simple that it is now immoral to ignore.

Yes, I attended Live8 Live with the thought that it was “just a concert”. I have chosen to ignore the pundits who criticized the reasoning behind the Live8 concerts. The concert did bring a solemn and respectable form of awareness to the entire crowd in front of me. Within less than ten minutes of the introduction to the concert I became aware of the situation at hand.

On the screens in front of me I saw Will Smith, a popular American Actor. Via video message he prompted the entire crowd to raise their left hands, a request they obliged. He then informed the crowd that they were going to do a click exercise. At this point I was incredibly ignorant to what the click exercise was. I watched as Will Smith snapped his fingers, every three seconds, chillingly proclaiming the death of another person in an impoverished country, “dead… dead… dead” for a “stupid, stupid reason”. The crowd in unison snapped their fingers with Will. The sight was astonishing and the sound that 30,000 people clicking at the same time make to represent someone’s death is unforgettable. While I realize that some in the crowd were not conscious of what was happening, I can assure you that I was.

Thank you Live8 I am aware.

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