To the people who keep asking why I care more about the slaughter of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists than other, even more massive tragedies, I’ve got this to say.
It is impossible to have equally intense reactions to everything. The human psyche can’t deal. It has to be selective about what it takes in and allows one to grieve over.
I have a much more intense reaction to my niece bumping her knee than to the horrible accident in Michigan. This doesn’t mean that I’m cruel or don’t consider the lives of people in Michigan valuable. It is normal to care more about what we know better. I never plan to go back to Ukraine, yet I care deeply about the events there for the simple reason that I understand them.
The brain invests energy into learning about things and then values these things because the knowledge came at a cost. I care passionately about Spain but have zero interest in what happens in the neighboring Portugal. The only difference between the countries (to me) is that I expended effort to learn about one of them.
I find it tiresome that people keep assigning sinister motives to the most normal things in the world. “Ooh, you care more about the few killed in Paris than the thousands dead in Iraq. Islamophobe! Racist!” This is just bizarre given that there is a much simpler reason: I grew up with French books, fairy-tales, TV shows, and French – Russian dictionaries. I’ve never been to Paris but I know half of the street names there. The very first childhood crush I had was on a French actor. I know the French literature better than most French. Plus, I’m a journalist who writes controversial things online. Plus, I’m Jewish. Yes, it’s a total shock I care.
Clarissa's Blog 
The problem is not that people care more about certain people, nations, or events than others. That is universal. The problem is that this fact coexists very uneasily with an assertion of absolute universal equalitarian values. If one makes a big issue of proclaiming that all men and women should be treated equally and attacks others on that issue than the discrepency between the ideology of equality and reality becomes something noticible. If one spends weeks asserting that “Black Lives Matter” and then completely ignores the brutal murder of people in Africa, well it looks very odd. I am not accusing you or anybody else here of being ideologically inconsistent. However, there is a strong strain of radical equalitarianism among certain US internet commentors whose discourse practices fall far short of their proclaimed ideals.
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I attended vigils for Michael Brown but didn’t invest as emotionally into the even more horrible story of Tamir Rice. And the only reason is that Ferguson is close to where I live.
But this works in interesting ways. I now stop and read all news items about Ghana when before I wouldn’t. And that’s only because I now know you. 🙂
I care about Nigeria, too, because I have a friend there.
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One point I think your critique misses is how much control or influence do you have over something? I mean, there are an insane number of NGO’s and govt. initiatives to help people in Africa but very few (if any) true democracies exist in such a fashion that they would take our help. While the “black lives matter” movement is tangible, real, and regardless of the right solution there is little doubt that people can have some degree of influence, most certainly greater influence than in Africa. Same thing with the issue in France. Western democracies will get to decide how to deal with peaceful assimilation of cultures, and deal with the fact that radical muslim factions right now do not appear to want to assimilate, but rather DOMINATE peaceful societies. No way in hell will western democracies let that happen (nor should we). So the battle will be to squash radicalism, while not being xenophobic, certainly a difficult task but possible, and frankly one that every western citizen has a role in.
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Matt makes an important point. I have recently started reading up on Africa and all I feel for now is extreme impotence and confusion. I don’t think there is anything here I can do other than try to inform myself and not be a jerk about it. It would be amazing if more people took the same position on Ukraine.
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I completely agree. This comment on twitter sums up my response to people wanting to hijack your emotional reactions to events.
https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/538014928448524288
Though, I have to point out that you’ve been guilty of this in the past. Many times when the topic of Israel slaughtering innocent civilians comes up (and god, it comes up too frequently for my taste) you’ve commented along the lines of ‘Why this focus on Israel? Don’t you know X country killed Y number of civilians this week/month/year as well? Why not be outraged about that?”
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I wasn’t addressing such comments to Israelis, though. Just to people who had invested nothing into the situation.
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“Just to people who had invested nothing into the situation.”
Just now you mentioned that knowing a friend from Nigeria makes you care about the country more. Maybe the people here who care about murdered Palestinians have similarly tenuous connection to Palestine, too.
On a separate note, I remember you chiding me for my anti-smoking stance a long time ago. Your argument was ‘If you care so much about cigarette smoke being blown in your face why don’t you protest against people who drive cars and create air pollution, which is far more dangerous to the environment’?
Anyway, my point was that because we care about some things more than others, we sometimes get upset that other people don’t care as much about the same things as we do. This results in conflicts, from innocuous ones like you telling me to protest against car drivers, to serious and utterly distasteful ones where someone will literally disrupt your grieving process to demand you grieve about something else first.
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Of course, if people have Palestinian friends, they will react strongly to the subject. But I don’t believe for a second that the sloganeering hysterics do. The ones I see busily reposting crap on Facebook are just trying to be fashionable, that’s all.
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\ Maybe the people here who care about murdered Palestinians have similarly tenuous connection to Palestine, too.
SB, I would be glad if you could sometimes remember that some people here have the opposite of tenuous connection: living in Israel, hearing sirens because of Hamas rockets this summer, a terrorist act which happened several years ago quite close to my house, taking buses during times of suicide terrorists exploding in Tel Aviv, knowing people who lost relatives in wars, etc.
You feel it’s OK for you to react strongly because of tenuous connection.
I LIVE here and if I react 1/8 as strong, you feel OK to call me names, etc.
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1/8 as strong? All you talk about is killing more Palestinians, or Iranians, or whoever you’re scared of on the day. Please tell me where I advocate hurting or killing anyone to solve a political problem. To suggest that my reactions are 8 time stronger than you once again reinforces how much you lack in self-awareness. Do you even realize how your foaming-at-the-mouth Israeli talking points sound to the rest of us?
Jesus, give me a break.
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\ All you talk about is killing more Palestinians, or Iranians, or whoever you’re scared of on the day.
???
Next time show me when I talk about killing more Palestinians. Seriously.
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“I feel we’ve not gone far enough in this war”
“I feel we should bomb Iran”
You unequivocally support every murderous action of your government.
God, I regret giving the example of Israel in this post. Should’ve stuck to smoking. I forget el has a google alert for every time the word ‘Israel’ appears on the fucking internet.
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YES!!! Let’s make at least one thread be not about Israel.
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SB, you are behind the times with Iran:
Report: Assad building nuclear facility in Homs
Hezbollah reportedly guarding new nuclear facility, being built with help of North Koreans; site said to be attempt to build facility allegedly destroyed by Israel in 2007 attack.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4613451,00.html
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180,000 people die a day. Roughly 2 a second. In the five minutes it took for me to post my two comments over 600 people have died in the world. 90%+ of old age, but then lets say 50-60 in tragic ways. Would be impossible to go on if every tragic death and situation moved us equally. Well stated clarissa with your overall point 🙂
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In any case, the notion that human beings exist only to provide mother’s milk to the unfortunate has to go. We are not these great cows and sympathy providers. We are not the cow in the sky or the bovine that makes the moon out of cheese. To insist that people become these sorts of things in order to prove their humanity is dehumanizing to the extreme. People have to accept that there is unevenness and evil in the world. It’s not because we are not being milk producers enough. Even if the whole of humanity became an enormous mammary gland, the fundamental problems would not be solved.
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Musteryou : my plane is about to take off so I can’t go on at length but YES. What you said us extremely valuable.
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One reason why I became much more involved in academics and less in activism was precisely because of this demand that you care equally for a multitude of issues. Nobody, myself included, leads a single-issue life, but I obviously gave more priority to causes that mattered to my heart, like autism/disability advocacy, Jewish-oriented social justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and queer issues. What I found as I ascended up more the ladder was that I reached a career plateau, because people in the upper echelons of nonprofits and organizations wanted workers who had a jack-of-all-trades approach to activism. They were willing to sacrifice precision of skills, intimate knowledge, and emotional investment for being broadly, vaguely familiar with issues A-Z and never leaving a single thing out or all hell would break loose.
At least in academia I can do my own thing without people demanding I familiarize myself with every subset to ever come out of my field.
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Leah: very interesting. I had no idea this spread so far.
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“They were willing to sacrifice precision of skills, intimate knowledge, and emotional investment for being broadly, vaguely familiar with issues A-Z and never leaving a single thing out or all hell would break loose.”
My current hypothesis is that “intersectionality” is either a very ingenious kind of planned sabotage (diffusing people’s commitment to any particular issue to the point where nothing can be done) or is an invention by those whose pet causes are naturally unpopular in an effort to get other people to carry their water for them.
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