WHY?

Today was a day spent with friends.... people I truly value. And I should be going to bed this evening feeling contented, But I'm not.

My friends Anna-Liisa, Kirsti and I saw a film called Twelve Years a Slave. It was based on the true story of Solomon Northup, a man sold into slavery, who escaped after twelve years and wrote a book about his experiences.

Coming out of the cinema I felt very quiet, as I think many others did too. I will never begin to understand how human beings treat each other the way they do. But I am not just talking about the extreme example of people being sold into slavery in the 1800s.

I spent almost ten years in the family law courts, then worked in the European Court of Human Rights and have also studied human rights law. All three dealt with cruelty and injustice on all sorts of different levels.  Unjustifiable behaviour towards others is occurring in every country and every city of the world. All the time. Not a hundred years ago, but now.

When future historians come to review the world as it is today... what will they say in their films about us? Us. A people spending billions on the Olympics and space travel and creating the next line of face cream - when half the world still doesn't have clean water to drink. A world where half the world is obsessed with botox and breast implants while the other half is mourning dead family members - because they weren't vaccinated against preventable diseases like malaria.  Are we going to be depicted as the most selfish and egotistical race ever to exist?

And why, in one of the most advantaged states in the world, are Finns so used to hearing stories of another person taking his or her own life? Could it perhaps be that in a state where in theory we have everything, so many people still feel alone and insignificant - because as a community we don't take the time and effort to make everyone feel that they matter?

Why, when you ask someone how they are, are you considered to be a "really good friend?"

Shouldn't caring about other people, and looking after them the best we can, be our natural way of being? Instead it seems we spend time criticising and judging others and trying to pull people down - when actually we have no idea what they have been through or how they are feeling about anything.

I am not asking for answers to these questions. But I nevertheless feel they need to be asked. If each of us genuinely cared about the welfare of others, the world would be transformed in an instant. As it is, I feel as though the films made in the future, about life in 2014, are going to leave their audiences just as appalled as I felt when leaving the cinema this afternoon.