Probably a common language has a lot to do with it, along with all its consequences in terms of sharing culture, consuming the same media, not to mention the increased facility for coming together and discussing things in public spaces like this forum.
I mean, not to labour the point, but:
Do you live, have you lived, or do you know anyone who lives or has lived in:
London?
Sydney?
Kabul?
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Do you speak:
English?
Pashto?
Dari?
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It’s not “right”, but it is what it is. If we could have more dialog and sharing of ideas and values and experiences with people in places like Kabul, that would be awesome, but I think there are barriers to doing so that just aren’t there for say an American looking to do the same with people from places like Sydney or London.
And no less human, for that. Hell, I have family members who have very different culture and values. [quote=“8080256256, post:85, topic:102120”]
That doesn’t make them less human but it makes them more distant, in every way.
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I guess I don’t agree with that? [quote=“8080256256, post:85, topic:102120”]
I think Jesus and a couple of bodhisatvas may have overcome this limitation and achieved universal undifferentiated love for all - but that’s a pretty high bar to clear for most.
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Maybe. But I think examples of universal love indicate that we’re more capable of it then we think. I do think that the media humanizing people who are brutally murdered in Kabul the same way they humanize people who were brutally murdered in London and Manchester would be helpful.
But what shapes our prejudices and biases? [quote=“Mister44, post:83, topic:102120”]
The difference in reporting I thinks is because the media is reflecting back what the average US persons’ interest it.
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Or what they think it is? Or what they believe the ideological underpinnings are? Or what sells the products between segments? Or what benefits the corporate owners of the station, paper, etc? [quote=“Mister44, post:83, topic:102120”]
Why waste time and energy with Kabul first hand accounts when not nearly as many people care?
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My point is that if maybe we heard that, maybe we would care more. [quote=“Mister44, post:83, topic:102120”]
Personally I think the media is shaped by the audiences interests mainly, though I agree there is some of the opposite going on.
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That’s an endless debate - is the media driven by audience or is the audience shaped by the media. A little of both, I suspect, but the people who create the content have biases, that are often at odds with the public. [quote=“Mister44, post:83, topic:102120”]
But that only comes into play if one takes the time to THINK about it. Which most people aren’t.
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I guess I think people CAN think about it, but don’t want to?
I don’t find that to be particularly helpful, as nothing is inevitable. And I do speak English and I’ve only been to London, and (other than here) I don’t know anyone from any of those cities. And of course, many Americans have never been to or know anyone from any of these places, because we’re not very good at traveling abroad.
I do know people in Geneva, Kuwait City, and part of the time, Istanbul, FWIW.[quote=“doop, post:116, topic:102120”]
Or is that too simple an explanation?
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You were talking about western reactions to tragedies in different places. Of course, the issues in the horn of Africa at that time appeared fairly simple. Famine and starvation, which could be remedied by food distribution. Or so it seemed.
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.
That’s cool. My Turkish friends’ families are mostly from the southwest coast, so I guess there’s a lot of human migration but at least there are few explosions.
Since we’re FWIWing the one time I met anyone from Kuwait it was a group of teenagers at the Jungle Camp in Calais. They were in the care of an older guy named Abdul-Karim, they were very open and hospitable and we spent about three days playing cards and me learning some basic Arabic vocabulary. One kid called Ahmed wanted to be friends on facebook, he never accepted my friend request in the end but after I left I did get to see his wall. There wasn’t much on there, some photos and two poems in Arabic, I think recited from the Koran.
One was an ode to mothers. Ahmed’s mother was already settled in England. Ahmed had left Kuwait four years earlier, and had spent all the time since in Calais trying to make the final crossing. When I met him his hand was in a bandage. The day I arrived in town there was a protest in the city square that ended in a group of people breaking a fence at the port and boarding a passenger ferry. For Ahmed’s troubles the CRS smashed his hand, although I’ll grant at least that it looked like he got decent medical assistance afterwards.
The other poem was a prayer to god that he might cleanse the earth of all Jews. When I met him, Ahmed and his friends were friendly and welcoming young men, well mannered and well looked after by Abdul-Karim, who they jokingly referred to as their mother. They were disappointed when I told them I had no god, they hoped I would be Christian at least, but they let me stay and shared cigarettes and dinner and drinks. I brought beers and drank with Abdul-Karim but the youths wouldn’t touch alcohol and refused to teach me any naughty words in Arabic, even when Abdul-Karim was not around.
We did have a great time together and shared photos on our phones of the places we come from and the people in our lives, but I didn’t stay in touch. About a year later the camp was broken up, I have no idea where any of them are now. Abdul-Karim told me he was leaving the camp to “go home” the same day I left, but I wasn’t able to ask whether he meant somewhere in France, or Kuwait, or even England.
When I turned up at the Jungle Camp I was worse than useless. I had a few token bags of clothes with me, which were appreciated, but when I tried to find out what people wanted it was more like, “I’ll pay you €5,000 for a boat to Dover.” They fed me, offered me a bed, and I went home in a waterproof poncho they gave me, along with a profoundly different sense of what was going on.
That was just a week-long thing that I did because I could, it sounds like you invested considerably more effort. For whatever it’s worth, whatever the outcome might have been, and whatever it has to do with this discussion, good on you.
