Staying informed, first step to empathy

Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund

In less than an hour one night last week, I read news stories about recently freed Yazidi captives suffering from shock of abuse, a woman who found her toddler twins drowned in her backyard pool, a young woman in Brooklyn dying from falling from her loft bed after a night on the town, the murder of a woman who prostituted children in the Bronx, and Anthony Scaramucci reminding me that anyone can rise to power in our country.

When I saw the next headline about someone killing his son, I decided to put down my phone and watch the rest of the Tinker Bell movie on Netflix. I don’t think it was escaping reality as much as choosing to focus on a different one — the one where my child leans on my spouse and me as we unwind on the floor after some cheap pizza and watch a cheesy show before putting our child to bed so we can talk about life.

I understand why people choose to remain uninformed. At some point, you would imagine that there would be some threshold beyond which humans could not pass when it comes to devaluing themselves and others. It’s depressing to face one tragedy after another via the news and end up feeling helpless and detached.

Yet unfortunately, being consumed with the everyday business of paying bills, preparing food, working, and spending time with family and friends remains a luxury to most people around the globe. It sounds a lot like that old warning about eating all your food because of all the starving children in whatever country most recently featured on a long infomercial, but knowing what’s going on in your community and around the world is a duty, and it’s only the beginning toward empathy and action.

Reading about suffering and injustice should do something to us, making us fear, grieve, rage, and maybe lose some sleep and question what we believe.

When I read about the Coptic Christians killed in the Palm Sunday bombing, as much as I’d like to think I would adhere to a nonviolent tradition and pray for my enemies, I don’t know if I’d be so strong in the same situation. People might disagree with my faith, but I’ve never lost a job or had my life threatened for it. I could not possibly understand what persecution like that would do to me, and I don’t think I would have dared to go to church the following Sunday for Easter service.

Following the news, even though I’ve missed more than I would like to admit, has changed me and will continue to do so, because it’s one way in which I learn about the burdens of neighbors I haven’t met yet and situations outside my experience.

I don’t think I’ll ever get over Tamir Rice’s case. According to all the reasons I read about why a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland had to die, any one of my friends should’ve been just as deserving to be shot. But they weren’t.

My neighbors and I used to run around our cul-de-sacs with airsoft and or paintball guns, shooting dirt mounds and rusty cans — sometimes each other. We didn’t think about whether those guns had orange safety caps to signify that they were toys. To make them more realistic, we might have rubbed them off, and when the police officers drove through the neighborhood, they might have told us to be careful, told us to go home, or at worst threatened to call our parents. None of us got shot.

I could blame a nebulous, unfettered evil for all the stories of broken lives that fill unfathomable web space and reams of paper, but these sins have names like racism, religious extremism, narcissism, sexism, and jingoism. While I don’t hold hopes for seeing these eradicated from the human experience any time soon, I don’t think that’s enough reason to accept that someone must necessarily endure them if it doesn’t affect me personally. No one needs to drop watching cartoons with their kids or binge-watching a favorite show to devote every moment to become the most informed. Engaging with a variety of news sources, however, is an important step but only the first in finding a way to fight for peace and justice.

Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund is a former news reporter for the Maryville Daily Forum, now living and writing in New York City.