Did you read about the Metro-North derailment?
If you’re from the Northeast, probably. If you’re not from the Northeast, it’s still a pretty fair possibility—coverage has been pretty wall-to-wall.
This is not to belittle the impact (sorry) of the accident, or the fear of the thousands of riders who need to rely on a certainly-less-reliable-seeming apparatus to get to their jobs, get home, or simply get where they need to go. But the Metro-North derailment killed four people. Four deaths isn’t something to trivialize; one death isn’t something to trivialize. Yet this absolutely pales in comparison with the 5,000 dead, just in the month of September, in Syria; the 5,672 dead in Typhoon Haiyan, in the Philippines; or, in painfully perfect parallelism, the 27 killed in Cairo two weeks ago when a train careened into a stream of oncoming cars. Metro-North, which has received the coverage of a global catastrophe, is a hiccup in the relative scheme of day-to-day pain and suffering – it’s the added sting of proximity, and the dramatic edge of instantaneity, that has given the wreck the kind of attention it’s received.
Metro-North hits close to home (I’m done) – and how much easier it is to empathize than sympathize. We can imagine ourselves bruised and battered, because it actually could have been us. That’s the article you want to turn to, the blog post you want to click on; the subject that affects you, now. Nobody wants to read about another IED detonation 5,000 miles away, when they can read about their kid’s school, or Sarah Palin’s latest airhead stunt. And that’s part of where your focus should be, on the world that immediately surrounds you. But when that focus overrides the consciousness that there is a world beyond the borders of your state or country, that is where human focus – and journalistic focus – has erred.
Moreover, the issue of empathy, need for renewed focus on the not-me, whatever, is a battle waged on two fronts; geographical, and temporal. It’s difficult to get traction on problems that take longer than the (absurd) average human attention span of 8 seconds to fully explicate; and more difficult still to retain a reader’s attention over a period of weeks, months, or years. And yet that span of 8 seconds is how frequently a child, somewhere in the world (but not here!) dies from lack of access to clean water. Flashy pieces about sex scandals and gory, instantaneous deaths sell papers, or accumulate page views; but they’re just one part of what goes on in the world.
It’s the slow problems that should merit attention, and are least able to. The war in Syria, despite a world’s waning interest, is still a humanitarian disaster; the death toll, so far, is estimated at 126,000, at least 11,500 of them children, with refugees pouring into countries as nearby as Lebanon and as far-off as Sweden. There’s a clean water crisis; over 3.4 million people die each year from lack of access to clean water, and as I mentioned above, a disturbing number of them children. There’s a living wage crisis; Black Friday was a boon for shoppers, but not the workers staffing it. There’s a global warming crisis, an AIDS crisis, an education crisis, an economic crisis (I’m talking wealth disparity, not 2008), a gender violence crisis in South Africa, and a human-trafficking crisis truly everywhere, from Nairobi to Nashville. Seen the ad, read the blurb, bought the pin. Next?
Journalists have a job to do like every other; they have to sell their product, and part of that necessitates cultivating, and appealing to, a receptive audience. The fault, by nature of the occupation, can lie only partially with them. It lies also with us, and I include myself as much as anyone; I’m a myopic narcissist when I want to be, which is often. I like to read local, and I don’t like reading bleeding-heart appeals like this one that try to make me think about all the things I don’t want to think about. We live in an information age, where the next op-ed or documentary telling you what you don’t want to know isn’t just accessible, it’s unavoidable. Maintaining modern man’s apathy is a full-time job.
So how do we find what to focus on? And after finding it, how do we avoid being the entitled, blasé, myopic narcissists the rest of the world so often, and perhaps correctly, accuses us of being?
I really don’t know. I’m asking.
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