What happened on Friday 13th November 2015 shook the world. The city of Paris was desecrated by a series of terror attacks. Lives were lost and hearts were broken. The devastation that occurred was largely incited by the stupor at the infiltration of the seemingly impregnable western blanket of safety. If ever there was an infrastructure of concrete cultural asylum, western democracy was undoubtedly nestled at the root of it.
What followed shortly after the events was a slew of social media support, polarised by a juxtapositional force of backlash. Social media users immediately divided into two camps; 1 - Those who quickly aligned with Parisian turmoil and changed their profile pictures to a blue, red and white camouflage, a long with #prayforparis hashtags on instagram, and 2 - People who were outraged by the seemingly disproportionate sympathy that was otherwise lacking in other worldly disturbances.
The good news is, both camps are right. In part.
The bad news is, this doesn't help anybody.
Firstly, lets consider Facebook's newly instated feature which allows users to show their Parisian support through a quick altercation of their profile picture, a sentiment that echoes the former gay pride movement. Here, we must beg the question, did the chicken come first or the egg? Because one can find grounds for indignation here, considering these are strongly Western grievances, which have yet to be mirrored for foreign damnation. But then, we must wonder if Facebook's feature is fundamentally rooted in the overwhelming social response for upheavals close to home, that are otherwise vacuous. If this is the case, it may be our personal delegation of empathy that requires closer inspection.
What seems to be the underlying problem in this intercontinental imbroglio is the concept of "my people" and "their people". By this, I mean the conditioned mentality that draws an invisible divide between races, subraces and nationalities. Most of us will spend our lives growing up and becoming increasingly familiar with the culture we live in. We also develop strong emotional and cultural ties to our heritage and ancestors, thus forming a meritable camaraderie with people we consider at one with. These become 'our people.' From thereon out, the bulk of our empathy is largely skewed and limited to persons who fall under such a category. Take, for example, hallmark historical travesties that we choose to pronounce. Often, American's will take to social media to call for remembrance of 9/11, The Jews will make light of the holocaust, Armenians will remember the genocide and so on and so forth. Is this wrong? No. It is simply how the human psyche has been conditioned to evolve. Realistically, nationalism makes little sense. 'My country is better than yours because i was born in it.' However, it is a social device that is imprinted upon us at birth in order to bind social sects and protect and preserve our land - more than likely incited through pre-historic municipalities, where social groups required a strong, intimate identity for survival. We can not ignore these social nuances that are imbued in our genetic imprint. However, as man evolves, we must also progress beyond that which is limiting us. It is time for us to understand that there is no "my people". There are only people. And all people are comprised of the same things that hurt us and heal us, and a skewed empathic compass is no longer excusable through negligence.
Every living creature on this earth has an equal right to life, and every loss is an equal travesty. The imagined hierarchal subdivisions of social value could be easily diffused if media and social outlets would not drive our focus so densely in one direction, to where we become conditioned to place less emphasis on lives that we do not so easily relate to.
Empathy, in itself, is usually derived from a point of understanding. If we can understand somebodies pain, we can feel it at their level. This is a beautiful mechanism, however, it is limited only to our understanding. It is easy to feel empathy in acts of barbarism that correlate with the daily lives we live. "That could've been me," is usually the catalyst for compassion. But empathy can not be relative. We become so ingrained in our idiosyncratic cultural strokes that it becomes difficult to understand the pain of a foreign body as pain in itself. This was largely the precursor to the acquiescence of slavery. The lack of cognisance and understanding of black people as people, but instead an alien body of beings, permitted a grave omission of empathy, which culminated in one of the most reprehensible acts in human history.
Our sense of humanity seems to be distorted by proximity and familiarity, which has manifested an emotional diaspora. We forget that a child is a child. In pakistan, in Palestine, in Japan, in Syria, in France. Our lack of foreign alignment allows us to displace the empathy that we should justly feel.
Are people upset that people are praying for Paris? No. People are upset by the disproportionality of social upheaval. Why is this the case? Two reasons. What the lack of support does do, and what the over-zealous support can do.
Firstly, it is worthwhile to recollect that some of the most notable calamities in social history are marred by nonchalance and social inertia. People often consider the holocaust to be the result of intensely anti-semitic Hitlerites. In actual fact, the impetus that materialised such a profound miscarriage of morality was largely apathy. Ian Kershaw notably remarked "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference."
Apathy is single handedly the most powerful tool for the catalyst of evil. A tool that is designed by capitalism in order to consolidate the proliferation of that very evil. With that being said, I arrive at my second point, what support can do.
It is difficult to accept how powerful a tool our voices are, and yet how dormant they remain for the bulk of worldly issues that require our attention. Moreover, the disproportionality of how and when we choose to use our voices. For example, let us recall when that majestic Lion was shot, and the world was riveted in acrimony. Following thousands of statuses, hashtags, pictures and petitions, major airline companies eventually called for the cessation of air-trafficking of endangered species. Elsewhere, the mass outrage of orca captivity that spiked the boycotting of sea-world culminated in the remission of orca whale hunting and captivity.
This demonstrates how effectively the union of society can move towards more utopian ideals. So it is understandable that one might feel indignant about the lack of such unity in other pressing issues. Surely, equal vehemence for atrocities and barbarism not native to us could evoke the moral reconstruction that we are perilously starved for.
In short, don't stop showing support. The overwhelming display of love, empathy and affinity is the dose of synthesis the world has long called for. However, don't spare it either. It is time to understand that there is no such thing as "my people" and "your people". There are only people. And all people have an equal right to life, and an equal entitlement to concern.
If this concept of "their people" was eradicated, we would likely see a remission of warfare, since combat is entirely based on the prevalence of one body of people over another. This is funnelled by the illusory conceptualisation of disconnection and dissolution. As long as people are divided by 'us' and 'them', the force that wills each camp to prevail will triumph in evil-doings, in this continued state of dystopia. This is the realisation that, ultimately, we must ubiquitously arrive at. And this recognition, that all people are "our" people, begins within the individual.
