How do we reach a place where the very act of mourning, the grief you feel over the ruthless murder of your fellow humans, becomes a political act by which you subjugate and dehumanise yourself? What more is there to learn about the inciteful and divisive intentions of the powers that shaped and shape our world, and our relative place in that world, than the realisation that even empathy itself is made a battleground that necessitates resistance lest you wish to submit to a hierarchy that does not recognise your life as a full life, a hierarchy that will use your empathy to bomb, murder, rob and impoverish those who are weak and poor, that will use your mourning to create and sustain tragedies for which the world will not mourn.
How do we reach a place where at the same time medics are rushing to rescue people, marketing heads are waking up graphic designers to create a web banner that best conveys their corporation’s grief and developers are paid overtime to create a profile picture transparency?
And you. How did we reach a place where your instinct after every tragedy is to unquestionably update your profile picture with a transparency? What discussions or debates can we have, what campaigns or protests can we run that could ever hold more sway than a one-click profile update through which you express your solidarity with your fellow humans while adding a brick to the menacing digital wall that places you on one side and on the other the millions of us whose newsfeeds for the past years have been full of images of our homes and peoples bombed, gunned and crushed?
How the hell did I reach a place where the only thing I can do, the only impact I can have is to update my status? Where my rant will be read by those who share my views and are just as helpless. Why do I speak up when the most influential listener is an algorithm that codes my anguish into an advertising bracket from which I will be sold some commodity in which will culminate my efficacy in the form of a profit made somewhere. And a full circle will be made where profit is made off the profit that was behind decades of foreign and domestic policies that brought us to this place.
43 killed in Beirut in one night and 128 killed in Paris the next. Dead. They were robbed of their lives and will be robbed of their legacies, forever to be statistics, talking points and rhetoric. How do we mourn for them in this place?
Well said Mark. These questions have no easy answers.
i feel very privileged to have a megaphone here at mondoweiss so my personal experience is somewhat different. i also don’t use FB nor have ever used a filter on my twitter profile. that said, it is strange most of us express ourselves over the internet — a drop in an endless sea of opinions.
but we can make a difference here. when we speak many more people can hear our voices. when we speak in unison (like w/hashtags) or are all horrified about one thing at one time we can swoosh the mainstream media narrative right down the toilet.
but the act of mourning, the grief we feel, is much more personal.
you have not reached a place where the only thing you can do, the only impact you can have is to update your status. you’re just frozen or stunned or something. there’s more you can do. much more. you just have to do it. reach outward. and thanks for writing this.
I agree.
Updating ones FB pic is about as unlikely to achieve peace as giving away more Israeli land.
Putin and Holland get it. Obama doesn’t… He’s still living in the fantasy world where compassion and empathy for maniac terrorists is rational. Unfortunately it will take an attack on US soil before the states collectively realizes they need unrestrained military action, not French Facebook flags. Muslim terrorist only speak one language and we should come through loud a clear to them.