Yeah, no, you and @milliefink are right. There is a lot more going on that needs to be discussed. But I think I’m still sticking to “a common language has a lot to do with it,” or am I completely off course here?
The Paris attacks were a pretty strange time for me emotionally, the Bataclan in particular being that there was also an attack in Istanbul at the same time. There was a lot of this exact sort of discussion going on, “how come facebook has a French flag but no Turkish one”, and I was inclined to agree with that sentiment. I didn’t know how I felt or how I should have felt. On the one hand the Paris attacks were very personal to me; my cousin did sound work sometimes at the Bataclan, but “thankfully” the band had their own crew that night. On the other hand I want to understand such events in a wider geopolitical context; France is a nation at war. Hollande declared war about a day later, and celebrated the fact by dropping slightly more bombs than usual, so the people who died in Paris were not the only ones to die as a consequence of the attacks. Who were those other people? I still don’t know.
I needed to talk just to get all my thoughts in order. My French wasn’t at a level where I could articulate any of that mess. It was good to hang out and get wasted with my anglophone friends, but their feels were a part of the feels I needed to process. My partner is wonderful but there’s only so much you can lay on someone when you have to share a two room apartment. I tried and failed to post something on facebook, I’ve always found the audience there too weirdly diverse to know what tone to take. I wanted to reach out to my Turkish friends, but I also felt like some of the automated sympathies there were insincere and even a little voyeuristic. Oh, so someone you know was sorta-not-really affected and now you care about the state of the world? That’s unfair to my friends who just wanted to know I was OK, like I say I was a bit out of sorts and I’m glad I held my tongue.
So I think about the most therapeutic thing I did in that time was to vent my frustrations at some unsuspecting bbs patrons who, to be fair, had it coming to them. The sympathies that I received from people of le monde anglo-saxon helped me to feel better about a lot of things. Thanks for that 
So I think that here counts, for what I’m talking about at least. Whether you would go so far as to say that you “know” the people here, here we are, participating in an exchange of cultures and a reinforcement of empathy that extends around the world but mostly to places where people speak English. Like some sort of fishbowl, I feel like the Anglosphere is something I didn’t see clearly until I spent some time outside it. I don’t have the same facility to reach out to people in Kabul and greater Afghanistan that I do to you, I guess internet penetration is a huge part of that but language is another.
I didn’t mean to say “and that’s how it always will be”, I just meant to say that I’m not, like, super stoked about the state of affairs. If people like you and me are going to do anything to help encourage empathy towards people in places like Kabul then I reckon communication will be an important thing to work on.
