Locality, Displacement, Jane Doe Effect?, Empathy and How to Process the News

I’m sitting up in a hotel bed in Las Vegas while my parents snore nearby. It’s only 8AM local time but I’ve been up for a while, working on New York’s schedule for the day before I head back to Houston for the week. (A typical travel SNAFU: I zoned out while parents planned the trip, thought it was an 8AM flight, not a 8PM flight, and so I forgot to take the day off.) Travel is always disorienting and a little bit bewildering: two days ago, I started the day watching the sunrise between two canyon peaks in Arizona. Last week at this time, I was sweating in my AC-less apartment in New York City, wondering if the bug my new roommate found was indeed a bed bug. Modern conveniences and jetsetter lifestyles create these bizarre disconnects between perception of time, place, and locality. I find it increasingly difficult to *be* somewhere 100% of the time, so much that when I come to terms with the idea of reality and where I am placed in this moment of time and space, I feel this strange sense of displacement: how did I even get here? Where am I? Wait, who am I? Am I the only person that gets this John/Jane Doe effect? I’ll wake up in a strange room and for a few moments, my mind will be utterly blank of everything except perception of my present “being-ness”.

That’s a little how I feel when I read the stories on the news. Having been in the desert/Wi-Fi deadzone, I’ve been completely out of touch with the world around me. I logged on today and read this piece, The Price of Blackness, about Michael Brown and Ferguson (which seems crazy right now). It immediately reminded me of a piece I read during MLK Day, Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King, Jr actually did, which struck me at my core with one line: “He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.” But what Lanre writes about is about fear, and the fatigue of feeling fear. That fatigue is such a profoundly saddening thing, because that fatigue is what drives people to their limits. They do terrible things and they do great things. That fatigue and the decisions of how to act upon it is what changes history.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, as always, because these topics currently grip my imagination: 1) cycles in history and how historical events impact the social, cultural, political, and economic attitudes of the people who live them, 2) how to best employ empathy and react to news of other humans suffering, and 3) how our environments shape us. And each time I read something like The Price of Blackness, it’s a punch to the stomach. I’m not in their shoes and I can’t feign to imagine. But that’s it: I can’t even imagine. And then my mind drifts towards the violence in Gaza and in general between the Israeli government, IDF, Hamas, and Palestinian civilians. And the absolute horror of ISIS in Iraq, what’s happening on the streets to regular people and what’s happening systematically to Yazidis. And in Syria. And in Ukraine. And all these planes vanishing or being shot down. About Ebola, which is the freakin’ most terrifying disease I’ve ever seen. This was a heavy, eventful summer in the world as much as it was a light-hearted one for me, and I’m constantly feeling this disconnect between the mirth in my life and the weight of what’s going on around me. Reading the news makes me feel like a voyeur, and when I peek into the hole and see the shockingly different lives on the other side, I step back a little bit, reeling. Add in the complexity of how these stories are portrayed in the media, and consider them distorting lens that obfuscate the peeking hole. I feel like a witness, but one thousands of miles away. I feel like a spectator of some particularly moving, engaging film, but there is this screen in between me and the subject, and when the movie is over, I will walk away. But here, the story continues on the other side.

The people I talk to are far from removed from these events. For some, it drives very close to home, threatening their loved ones if not their cultural and national identities as a hole. But mostly, the interaction goes like this: “Whoa, did you hear about this?” “Yeah, it’s crazy……… (discuss details, possibly ethics, spin around in circles” /moment of silence/ And then you move on. At the same time, while this daily interaction goes on, I know this history is steamrolling its thumbprint over the people living at this time. One article, The awful decisions I’ve made to to protect my Palestinian children from this war:

My children, as with all children in Gaza, will need therapy following this carnage. Most, of course, will not receive it.  They will enter adulthood remembering these days and the soldiers, F-16s and drones that were heedless of their nighttime cries and terror. Their mothers and fathers — unable to guard their children from these horrors — will need psychological help. And grandparents may have it worse of all, since the midnight terror this month feels terribly like the nights nearly seven decades ago when they were expelled from their homes in what became Israel, never to return.

We are living in a strange time. The disconnect I feel from perceiving this living history of it is jarring.