In the current ecosystem of 24/7 media outlets and social media communication, each topic has its own allotted time. It builds, peaks, and dissipates. Sometimes the build is impressive or the speed of the approach is breathtaking. Other times we are dazzled by the height or intensity of the peak.
But then it dies out and goes away and one day we realize we’re not talking about it anymore.
We have become used to this. We steel ourselves to the waves and crashes. We can tolerate it if we tell ourselves it will soon be going away. Awful news may rain down upon us and break our hearts but then the pain will stop and life will be normal again.
And, to be honest, I think humans have a limited capacity to the amount of trauma they can process over time. We don’t know how to keep carrying everything. 24/7 news cycles make that worse. There’s too much to process and so we have come to rely on that artificial ebb and flow which will certainly wash away those things that are troubling us before we just can’t cope anymore.
But news cycles and trending topics and viral videos are not the whole truth. They are mechanisms to package and manage what we know and what we buy and what we can come to expect. Just as our lives are not like a half hour sitcom or a one hour drama where everything will be resolved in the time allotted, world events just keep going.
Some things don’t go away. We don’t want to accept it and it makes us uncomfortable. We will go to great lengths to suppress or discredit the people round us who keep telling us the unremitting truth about painful things:
- COVID and Long COVID
- Systemic racism and white supremacy
- Gun access and school shootings
- Genocide in Gaza
Hush, darling. We don’t talk about that.
Bro! Nobody wants to hear about that!
Give it a rest,will you?
Time after time I see people who are sharing information rooted in tragedy, injustice, and pain and the overwhelming response is not to respond to the tragedy but to censure the victim. They have offended our sensibilities by suffering for too long in a public space and refusing to be silent. We would rather judge the people who remind us of uncomfortable things than to maintain mental and emotional space for human suffering.
Woe be unto those whose words and actions trouble us for longer than we want to be troubled.
It is easier to say that they are just annoying people who are loitering in the public consciousness than to admit the truth: that some horrific things are ongoing and that we probably aren’t doing enough to make them better. We have made a bargain with the horrors of this world. We cannot stop them from happening but we can set a timer. Once that time is up - - boom! - - the tragedy du jour must be evicted.
When anyone around us doesn’t follow that bargain, we make them the problem. It is easier for us to turn our anger and heartbreak and fear into something manageable. We ball it up and toss it at those inconvenient truth tellers whose very existence hints at things we do not want to accept.
The sickness is not going away. The injustice is ongoing. Guns still flow too easily to people who will shoot up schools. The death, destruction and starvation in Gaza continues.
Sit down darling, everyone’s heard that already. Really, you’re embarrassing me.
I’m going to close by sharing a sentence from a book I read long ago.
If your car breaks down in a snowstorm, God will not come and fix your broken car but he will come and sit with you in the snow.
We can’t possibly know about everything and care about everything in every single minute. We can’t right all the wrongs. But we can let ourselves be uncomfortable (more than think we are able to) simply to listen to those who are suffering and really, really hear them.
We cannot fix their cars but we can sit with them in the snow.
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