On Friday November 13, Paris faced tragedy. As a result, #prayforparis began to trend on Twitter. Following that, #prayforjapan and #prayformexico also began to trend because they faced their own tragedies as well. It seems that whenever somewhere in the world is faced with a tragedy, #prayfor___ trends.
This is starting to bother me.
Now, I am not telling you that you should not be praying for these countries when tragedy happens—we should be. Nor am I telling you that we should not be praying. We should be praying for whomever we think we should pray for, for these people to have safety and somewhere to go and that these terrible tragedies will end.
I will say that the hashtag does help because it does bring awareness to global issues. However, have you ever seen a hashtag with the word pray in it, when it didn’t revolve around a tragedy? We should not only be praying when something awful happens, but we should pray for all things—good or bad. We should pray when we are struggling, when great things are happening, when we need guidance and we should pray when tragedies do occur. We should remember to pray and be thankful that we woke up today, because that is a beautiful thing, to be alive and well.
And we should not only be praying for the countries that make it onto the news. We should be praying for all countries. We should be sending our thoughts and prayers to people around the world faced with a lack of human rights, faced with terror on a daily basis. The news likes to focus on only one thing at the time. While everyone was focusing on what was happening in Paris—Beirut, Lebanon was also attacked by ISIS. But no one will talk about that.
Paris has received a global outpour of support but Beirut has not. And why is that? The reasoning is obvious. Lebanon is an Arab country populated largely by Muslims. And America tends to focus solely on countries similar to it, also known as Western Europe. Any other place, even Eastern Europe, is greatly overlooked, from the second we see that these other people are different from us—race, religion, and culture-wise. One of my friends that currently lives in D.C, attended candlelight vigils at the French and Lebanese embassies that weekend. The Paris attack garnered the attention of dozens of students from the major schools in the area—from Georgetown to American, from George Washington to Catholic. The media was there as well, NBC filming the occasion and taking interviews. She and her friends then headed over to the Embassy of Lebanon to pay their respects as well, to find the street completely deserted. That is the kind of biased culture America has. We will gather and pray for one group of sufferers but not for another.
Our generation is consumed by social media. We find the need to do whatever it is that social media is telling us to do and when we see something trending we feel like it is our responsibility to tweet about it. Whenever we see the #prayfor__ we will tweet, retweet and favorite anything that has to do with it.
When you think about it, though, do you think the millions of people who use the #prayfor__, are actually praying? Do you think that people are just tweeting that because they feel like they are obligated to?
Most of the time, people will tweet about it and end up not praying for whatever they said they will pray for. People see changing their Facebook profile picture to the French flag as making a difference. Although what happened in these countries is truly a tragedy and we should be praying for the people who live in these countries, we do not need social media to tell us that we need to pray -- we should take that upon ourselves.
Everyone has a different method of praying, whether it is praying to a God or just keeping someone or some place in your thoughts. It should not take events like the ones that have been happening to remind us that we need to pray.
Pray because you want to. Not because social media is telling you that you have to.
