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| France is also real to me, and many others in the U.S. because it exists in our overflowing digital albums on Facebook or Flickr. |
Outwardly we express sadness, but inwardly, we carefully distance ourselves. Our slightly-guilty internal conversations resemble those I have with my middle-class American social studies students. "Aren't you glad we aren't in Syria? Let's hope our borders are 'safer' than Europe's. Still, maybe we should be more involved in taking in Syrian refugees into the U.S., rather than letting Europe shoulder the social burdens alone. But then, that opens us up to some of the same security risks. Aren't you glad we aren't the ones who have to weigh the ethical and pragmatic pros and cons of that decision?" It's an empty and privileged and well, downright callous conversation, but it just IS. Meaningful compassion, much less action, is undermined by our fundamental American (and well, human) inability to cope with so much death and destruction outside the sphere of our individual influence. We can care all we want, but long-term avenues for positive involvement in other cultures or countries seem barred to us.
If we in the U.S. have an inability to cope with the world's problems, we also cannot wrap our minds around the world's treasures. Generally, we second to eighth generation Americans cannot cope with life outside our insular world unless it is packaged in one of the following ways:
- Material needs (They need us to intervene! We need to save! We need to be messiahs! Otherwise we feel helpless and guilty.)
- Fearful speculation (But that will affect us! It might happen here! We have X ethnicity, X religion here! X kind of group migrates here! We have military engagement over there!)
- Travel itineraries (How can we avoid that huge border control/visa problem when we go to Hungary? I mean, we don't need visas but, we don't want to get stuck in a refugee filled queue, either.)
- Entertainment value (Is it news? I mean, is it loud--bright--scary--juicy?)
- Economic effect (Wait, but the last time Greece went bankrupt, it affected MY business. What about this time? Should I sell those stocks?)
What we forget to do is care about the world when it's not hurting. When we see Pakistan in the news it's because ISI has some new internal scandal, or there's been a church bombing, or the Af-Pak border is causing more problems for U.S. military personnel. We don't hear about the new Sufi-rock group going on tour, or the new female-centric TV-drama, or the journalist starting a small social revolution in Karachi... that is until one of those parities has been victimized by a militant group's actions or a environmental catastrophe.
It's not that the world exactly "cares about Paris" more than Beirut, but we in the U.S. certainly "KNOW" more about Paris. France has been in our imaginations (and maybe even our passports) our whole lives. We think we know France, we may even feel that we are France in some loose ontological way. It's also easy to argue that European and North American society owes France a massive cultural and philosophical debt. Our literature, music, and political history is intertwined. We may be too comfortable with our stereotypes of French culture, but at least we HAVE stereotypes about the fundamentals of French national character.
We don't know Beirut or Lebanon ... even our stereotypes are empty. Lebanon doesn't exist for us as a separate entity from other vaguely violent Arab-majority countries, and might only exist in the minds of Americans 40 and up because of the long presence of the Lebanese civil war in the nightly news or the significant Christian population (40%).
Just a few days before the Beirut attack, my students and I played a "guess the language/location of this song" game. When we came to Fairouz's Le Beirut (which has the name of the capitol in the very refrain) everyone struggled to even place the city on a map, much less divine the language or culture.
In the age of the Internet and YouTube and globalized trade, there's literally no reason for us to strain to know or care about a maybe uncomfortably different, maybe geographically vague country called Lebanon when it is hurting. A lot of people are hurting, and anyhow, caring about someone only when they're in a crisis situation is the least meaningful and personal way to care. If we want, we can EASILY access things that will make us care about threat to an entire culture (even if that culture ISN'T European). Lebanon (or Egypt or Iraq or Pakistan for that matter) is literally one click away.
So let's change that. Share what you love, even when nobody else knows its origin, or its context, or its meaning. Make us love things that are far away, different, and a little terrifying in their alien rules and rhythm. Places, like people, deserve to be loved for what they are, not just what has been done to them.
