The Privilege of Distance

We’re used to seeing suffering on TV—real or fictional. The real is most disturbing, but people can’t sustain a state of alarm indefinitely. I’ve often wondered about the effectiveness of the near-constant pleas for money for this or that candidate or party months and even years before an election. By now both my snail mail and email overflow with dire predictions if I don’t donate. Am I afraid? Of course. There’s a difference between idealistic candidates and those seeking only power. I love my country as a democracy and the prospect of it morphing into something else is terrifying. But it can’t be terrifying all the time. And my meager funds—even every penny—can’t change a trend. I have to step away to preserve my sanity.

Fear and guilt open wallets—or so the fundraisers hope. The videos of starving dogs chained out in the snow always hurt. I love animals—frequently more than manipulative humans. But I have two rescued dogs. At this point in my life, more would not be better—for them or me. “Look away,” I tell myself. “You can’t save them all.”

The sheer brutality of war is almost unimaginable. Like the sadism of rapists or murderers, war can degrade people to the monsters they like to see in movies. Sent by monsters to be monsters, the individuals coalesce into troops that gradually lose humanity under the toxins of horror. Children maimed. Mothers raped. Families torn into bloody bits. We can hear hate sneering. We can watch aid workers being killed. We’d rather see the destruction. The agony of victims hurts…but we’re looking from a distance, watching people washed away in floods, slammed through glass doors, tortured and starved and treated worse than the animals tied to winter posts.

When the destruction doesn’t have an organization behind it, we’re able to be more empathetic. We feel safer. Storms aren’t contagious—are they? We donate to disaster victims, send ships of medical care, but we don’t want to keep hearing about people in countries that aren’t equipped to deal with modern crises. We don’t want to see them on our streets. We don’t even want to hear about the vulnerabilities of our own nation.

We’re the privileged few—at least for the time being. We’re watching from a distance. We have the option of averting our eyes, turning down the sound, clicking off the various incarnations of the news. We can pretend the consequences won’t matter that much to us. I don’t have a simplistic answer. Maybe you do. For now, I do as much good as I can afford financially and emotionally and then look away, hoping against hope that enough loving people will step forward to change the scene.