My Heart is Full

My heart is full. For the last four days I have been paying about as little attention to the news as possible. I spent a lot of time with family and friends, I went out to eat, I saw a movie, I went to a concert, I watched a lot of sports on TV. My favorite sport, baseball, began its regular season today. Instead of reading deeply into the epic tragedies of today's world, in what spare time I had I immersed myself in preparing a fantasy baseball team. I had fun with my kids.

The emotional and psychological impact of staying informed and aware of the tragedies constantly befouling the earth sneaks up on me in ways I can't see until I am able to step away from it. I feel guilty stepping away from it. Stepping away is a privilege. The people of South Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia and Somaliland, and elsewhere... they can not step away from it. It is their existence. They need people to not step away or to look away.

But this is our reality. It has been created for us. Reading and listening to Noam Chomsky for almost two decades now has me aware that the distractions are all there because the American populace, and any world populace, is a powerful force when it awakens. It needs to be tamed and the constant distractions are good to tame us, to keep us from exercising our strength to change things for the better.

But this is the challenge. Psychologically, emotionally... it is so much easier to forget, to look away from the starving black child or the traumatized (or dead) Syrian child. To look towards them is to stare into the pit of a sense of individual powerlessness. Individually I can do nothing. Collectively, we could save them. We could take our minds, our creative energies, our dollars, our time... away from the concerts, the ballgames, the fantasy sports teams, the tv shows, the movies... we could redirect them towards food and shelter for the least of our brothers and sisters. Or we could redirect them towards creating an economic system that does not embed such criminal disparities in wealth.

To varying degrees, Americans and westerners in general choose to look away. Maybe it is not such a conscious decision, but we do. In this way we are complicit in the destruction.

So often when I try to speak out about important issues it feels like I am calling out into the darkness. Maybe this is a skewed perception created by social media, where my posts about climate change are met with crickets and tumbleweed, but a post about attending concerts with my daughter receives 70 likes and 20+ comments.  People talk about all kinds of personal problems among friends and at work, but we don't much talk about the 6th mass extinction in the world, or the civilization-threatening spectre of climate change, or what the U.N. is calling the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II, all things that are part of the world right now. They are not part of polite conversation at the office. I can be having an emotionally difficult day as a result of reading about these things but I won't even tell my wife I am having those feelings, let alone my co-workers or my friends.

I don't know how to begin overcoming the stigma. I don't know how you psychologically prime people to turn away from the glitz and glamor and stare meaningfully at the abyss. When an earthquake destroyed Haiti, or a tsunami destroyed Indonesia, mass media gave the story to the west and we opened up our wallets to help. People are capable of helping. I guess it just seems like the right alarms are not sounding. I watched the NCAA Men's College Basketball Championship Game tonight and there was an ad for the local news- the stories it advertised were a turkey that somehow got into a family's house, and it was captured on home video, and how people are chosen to sing the national anthem at baseball games. This is supposed to the fucking news. There is a humanitarian crisis in Africa right now. Millions of children are at risk of starvation.

I don't know. My heart grows empty.