I was a millisecond away from tweeting my friend about her “boring” Irish roommates in Dublin when I saw the first tweet about Paris on Friday, November 13th. A cold, almost hovering over myself, type feeling came over me when I tapped on #PrayForParis for the first time that night. I saw tweets about explosions at soccer games and mass shootings at a concert hall. It was as though I was reading about some of my worst fears really happening, at the same time, everyone else in the world experienced the same thing.
I thought of how in exactly two months I have plans to be on a plane to Paris from Dublin. I thought of another friend, dancing in a Paris nightclub the evening before she flew to Morocco for the adventure of a lifetime. I thought of all the times I’ve seen concerts at so many venues and always walked out happy and healthy, and how that night 127 people did not get that privilege that I had never considered.
Our globalized, technology-oriented generation has a certain indifference to most suffering in the world. We see it all the time. If we are not watching the news about turmoil in the Middle East, we are watching a show with a fictionalized version of the same conflicts. Sometimes, we just don’t feel the pain that we should when horrible things happen, even though we know about more injustices in the world than other generations could have ever educated themselves about. It is true to some degree that the media gets to control the injustices of the world that we know about, and therefore our feelings about these events. It is not a coincidence that I saw #PrayForParis before #PrayForBeruit. Often technology, press media, and social media reinforce social norms and practices set well before the invention of Twitter. This is not to say that as millenials, we should be trying our best to repurpose technology to include empathy for everyone.
Consider the way that CBS was able to hold the second Democratic debate and use the mass murders of so many people as a talking point for presidential candidates. Both parties have to politicize tragedies in order to advance their own agendas. The GOP is definitely much more obvious when they do this. When Donald Trump responds to Americans’ fear of ISIS by saying he would, “Bomb the hell out of the them,” raging about the disadvantages of Parisian gun-free zones, he is furthering his political agenda. Likewise, when Bernie Sanders says that climate change is inextricably linked with terrorism, he is furthering his agenda that rejects the imperialism that has caused climate change and radicalization of parts of the Middle East. This is a hard truth to face because all of us fall into one of these camps and the message matters. Their messages set the stage for what we say and how we say it during trying times. And while we argue about whether or not we agree, or if it’s appropriate to bring politics into a disaster, CBS walks away with profits from airing the debate, and then airing Trump’s and Huckabee’s tweets about the debate the following morning.
Perhaps what is even worse than a handful of politicians running through their talking points, is that in our age of social media anyone can say anything about such a terrible tragedy without facing any consequences for their words or actions. Just as easily as someone can type, “This is awful. My prayers are with Paris,” another person can just easily advocate for literally murdering other civilians in retaliation. As real, everyday people we have even more of an obligation to watch what we say, think and do in times like these. It is squarely on our shoulders to show compassion for people victimized by terrorism. It is equally our responsibility to deal with the problematic reactions of our friends and family to terrorism. We know for certain that our Muslim friends and classmates would never condone such heinous crimes, we have to speak up. Whether we do this by sharing John Oliver’s take on these events (which you should), or by telling your aunts and uncles to behave themselves when they say outrageous things around the Thanksgiving table.
It is also our responsibility to offer support. We have to speak out against terrorism, and we have to strive to make the world a genuinely safer and freer place because that is the only way that tragedies like Paris can be stopped. The world has to become more about love and celebration than separation and difference. When the humans begin supporting and caring for other humans — which should be so easy in the age of social media — people can stop turning to these radical organizations for their help and a sense of belonging.
In other words, when our globalized culture becomes a real globalized community, then the terrorists really lose.