The World Still Hasn't Ended

There are lots of awful things going on in the world.  We hear and read about them every day.  In fact, that's often all we get to hear and read on our popular news outlets.  We should congratulate ourselves for mustering the courage to leave the house.  We even merit a pat on the back for getting out of bed.

I often wonder what it is about humans and bad news.  It must be something like train wreck syndrome.  We can't avoid gawking.  We seem somehow programmed to be fascinated over tragedy.  I wonder if this is a kind of reptilian brain style empathy.  You know what I mean, Gentle Reader: We all have that capacity of being impacted by other people's sorrows, pain and suffering.  But this is often poorly informed and not at all developed.  So we have the very elemental expressions of empathy: a mother or father defending their children from an attacker, for example, or a warrior defending their tribe.  But that is where the empathy ends.  Otherwise it becomes a reason to run away and hide, if it's the pain of someone we are not connected to or who isn't like us, or to deny and ignore, or to stare and transform into a freak show for cheap thrills.

It becomes almost like watching porn (not that I have any experience to boast of!), and we get a sleazy, but intense, vicarious pleasure from watching a YouTube beheading by Islamic terrorists, or The World Trade Centre going down in flames, smoke and dust, or...watching a train wreck.

There are good things that happen in the world.  Lots of acts of kindness, selflessness and personal sacrifice, but these are seldom noted, noticed or reported about.  Virtue and altruism don't seem to grab us the way tragedy and grotesque acts of cruelty.

I say, don't ignore the bad, the negative, the cruelty.  Those are facts of life and we have to resist the temptation to hide, escape, ignore, sugar coat or whitewash.  By the same token it would also be helpful if we were to become perhaps a little more self-aware about just what it is about vicarious tragedy and evil that makes us sit up and take notice; and especially to address and challenge that part of our reptilian brain to which such horrible things appeal.  In fact, we need also to redouble our efforts towards the good, towards reaching out in kindness and good will and friendship to those around us while challenging our fascination with the dark side of our humanity.  Our natural empathy needs to be trained and cultivated in such a way that we really become interested in the welfare and wellbeing of others, no matter who they are, no matter how difficult it is to naturally relate to them.  This I think is why we are often more ready, willing and able to reach out to a middle class family made suddenly homeless by a fire than to try to help and understand better our own chronically homeless who languish on our sidewalks.

In the Christian faith there is a word for this process of change.  It is called repentance, or, a complete turning around from one way of being to a way that is totally different.  We all have this capacity and we are all called to implement repentance in our lives.  We have only to rise to the occasion.