When public tragedy strikes, it understandably sets people on edge, highlighting the vulnerability of safe places and insulated populations. Events like the Newtown massacre and today's bombings at the Boston marathon set my Facebook page twittering with heartfelt outreach, with the sending of thoughts and prayers, and with people fearfully finding themselves able to relate to the circumstances and the victims. I hate to admit it, but since the Aurora shooting, I am frightened of going into movie theaters, especially for popular, high-profile films. And I feel for those who were affected and continue to be. We have seen too many sad events both in the US and abroad in recent years.
But, each time I am faced with people's anger and philosophical questions that stem from these incidents, I find myself reflecting upon why we, as a society, are not infuriated and heartbroken every single day. Because, the fact of the matter is, we live in a world where the the tragedies are rampant and the inequities are astronomical. As Americans, we live in a country where the wealth gaps are among some of the largest in the world; where we have accepted the fact that some people will die because they cannot find, or afford, safe, appropriate shelter; where some of our cities have some of the highest gun murder rates in the world (America's 10 Deadliest Cities; Gun Violence in US Cities). In Baltimore, in the past 30 days, 22 people were murdered; all of these people were Black; all but three were men. My guess is that most were poor. In Detroit, a city that gets roughly 3,000 fires annually, firefighters seem to disproportionately (compared to other cities) risk their lives entering dilapidated and ostensibly vacant structures in an effort to save the have-nots who have too likely taken refuge within. Yet we do not seem to regard these systemic, structurally-rooted, forms of violence as violence, we do not view them as a call to reproach the system or challenge the culture.
I certainly grieve for the many victims of these highly-publicized incidents; I am sad for those who lost their lives, for those who lost their loved ones, for those who lost their sense of security; but my outrage runs much deeper, and finds its roots at the many daily tragedies we just accept. I am baffled, not by the occasional "crazy" or the periodic sociopath (or group of sociopaths), but by a country that so systematically oppresses entire groups of people, that abandons them and blames them and deems them "undeserving", not only of our tax dollars, but of our tears. I am angry because at the end of the day, it feels like nobody cares enough about those people to question society. We, as a culture, have expanded this "deserving vs undeserving poor" mentality to "deserving vs undeserving" period . . . "innocents" are deserving of our grief, they're the reason for reflection. The poor, the oppressed, we can sweep them under the rug again and again and again. I'd like to think we're just so numb to it now, that it's been too painful, so we can't react to (structural as well as physical) violence on such a scale, with such regularity. But I don't think that's it. I think, at the end of the day, we just don't care as much about those folks.
Many people will make the argument that an awful lot of these people were not "innocent", that they were embedded in systems that create and perpetuate violence. Others may cite moral transgressions or "weaknesses" as justification. But we cannot fool ourselves or construct ourselves as innocent by denying our own complicity in such systems. With very few exceptions, we - even the most oppressed, even the well-meaning, among us - are part of the problem, if for no other reason than we all work harder to get by (to succeed even) within the structure when perhaps we should be dismantling it (thank you to Paulo Freire for this image of the oppressive oppressed).
And this is, of course, where I get bogged down. As an anthropologist, I seek to understand: I ask myself, has my home culture has always been this way, so callously favoring the wealthy? I seek to understand the larger structural systems that have set us all up in opposition to one another, that seem to require some to suffer so others can succeed. I ask whether xenophobia is a cultural or a human phenomenon. But when I try to think just as me, just as a person, not as an academic, I don't know if I care why. I want to know what we are going to do about it. Then, feeling too vulnerable and ineffective, I bring my inner-academic back out and wonder, is it possible to effect meaningful (and desirable) change without answering these other questions? And that I don't know. For now, I know only this, and I will choose to reflect upon it every day, not just when the media decides something awful has happened: My heart will go out to the poor, to the suffering, to the daily murdered or beaten or frightened, to those who find themselves oppressed, exploited and excluded. I will think of them every single day. And maybe one day I will have an answer.
