As I write, the world is still reeling over the ISIS attacks in Paris last week, as global outpouring of solidarity with the victims continues to be expressed both online and offline, punctuated for us Lasallians with the lighting of the St. La Salle Hall in the colors of the French flag. Along with these expressions of support came a discussion on the overwhelming compassion geared towards France, in contrast to the support received by other victims of terror and acts of war in other parts of the world.
To be fair, the arguments do have a point. Beirut was attacked by the same group just a day prior, while the Lumads have had entire homes and schools burned to the ground a few hundred kilometers south of Manila over the course of the past few months, all of which received a tiny fraction of the attention that Paris has garnered in the past week.
Please don’t get me wrong. I do not wish to treat tragedies like a competition, and certainly, showing compassion is nothing we should criticize. But the selectivity of our response, and the reactions of people towards those who point this out, leave a lot to be desired. Glossing over the issue in the name of a vague claim of compassion for all those who suffer does nothing for the twice disenfranchised — first in their suffering and second, in our collective inability to pay attention. It is also intellectually lazy.
To say that all the support on social media is just on social media, that people also pray for others who suffer outside of Paris or are equally aware of these other issues is problematic because these responses don’t really do anything aside from reassuring people of their own righteousness. Let’s stop pretending that social media is separate from our “real lives,” because people do, in general, give thought into what they do or do not share, and whether they do or do not change their profile pictures in support of a cause. These decisions, while purely online, hold a tremendous amount of symbolic meaning even offline, and if the argument against the criticism is that they do not matter as much, then there is little reason for making these decisions on social media — for France or any other party — in the first place. I’m not saying that people who did change their profile pictures are ignorant of or indifferent to all others who suffer, because it is entirely possible to have used the Tricolore filter and still care about other issues. What I am against is the refusal to recognize this as a meaningful symbolic act, with people claiming that “it’s just a profile picture,” or that “it doesn’t matter what colors we place,” because these obviously aren’t the case.
That there is so much suffering in the world for people to express concern over and for media to cover is a problem in and of itself. I will not deny that mainstream media is partly to blame for the imbalance we see. Because traditional and social media have produced so much content for the victims of the Paris attacks, so much attention has also been called not just to what they feature, but also to what they do not. For example, there is no 24-hour blanket coverage for the bombings in Beirut or the atrocities committed towards Lumads. There is no Facebook filter for them or any of the other countries ISIS attacks on a regular basis either.
One of the reasons for this may be that Beirut, Mindanao, even Syria and other war-torn places have been tumultuous for ages. The amount of suffering in those areas is horrendous but not altogether unexpected given their history, with these people inheriting generations’ worth of struggle and eating bad news for breakfast regularly. This, of course, does not make their suffering any less real or horrific, but perception plays a huge role in what media does or does not choose to bring to light. On the other hand, our collective image of Paris — a top global destination, the city of love, the subject of hundreds of cultural references and travel bucket lists — makes the same atrocities so striking, and therefore more “newsworthy.”
While the communications student in me remembers the elements of newsworthiness discussed in class and understands, to an extent, the whole host of structural and logistical concerns in news coverage — among them the number of people on the ground, what information can be uncovered, how many editors are ready to proof content before publishing, how much money could be spent on any single coverage — it is also my hope that we are more than all of that. Despite understanding the limitations and the fact that most media institutions do indeed rely on advertising and, as a consequence, clicks on articles people find interesting or shocking, it still feels as if we have written off human suffering in more remote parts of the planet, or have accepted it as normal.
So now we end up asking chicken-or-egg questions regarding our collective lack of empathy — is the media to blame for feeding us a meal of 90 percent Paris and 10 percent the rest of the world, or are we, for wanting those proportions? Do we demand certain types of news over others because of what we have already been exposed to?
In the end I wish we could all blame this disparity on just the media, or just the audiences. I wish there was a single culprit, but there is no such thing, and gaining a deeper understanding of this is one step towards resolving the issue. What is difficult in online discussions, especially highlighted in the comment section of last Sunday’s photograph of the St. La Salle Hall, is that people who raise questions about the overwhelming support for France and a seeming lack thereof for others are automatically labelled as haters or social climbers. Apparently you are either a supporter or a hater, with no space to exist in between.
But the fact of the matter is, this is no black-and-white issue. There is nothing black-and-white about France’s ruthless airstrikes over Syria this past week (which, by the way, they had begun doing in September, the only difference between now and then being that after last Friday, they have less regard for civilian lives). There is nothing black-and-white about the current debate on the European immigration policy, or the terrifying raids in poor communities said to be breeding grounds for radicalism in the outskirts of Paris.
The sooner we stop pointing fingers, the sooner we can start looking inwards to figure out how we are part of the problem. The sooner we realize that, the better.
