I had a conversation with a friend recently, who shall remain nameless, about why it is that everyone is devastated about the bombings in Brussels that happened just last week, but no one cared about the ones in Turkey or Tunisia also perpetrated by ISIS that have occurred in the past year.

Now before I get into this, I am not by any means discounting the tragedy of what happened in Brussels. Many lives were lost and many families were devastated, and they all deserve our grief and our anger.

My question is, why do we get to pick and choose what we grieve? I asked this to my friend, along with the question, why do we only care about “first-world” countries and not "the third world?” To which my friend responded, “What happened in Brussels is news. That doesn’t happen every day over there. What happened in Turkey isn’t.”

This is, unfortunately, the logic a lot of people have. Because violence is an everyday occurrence some places, it isn’t news when something gets blown up there. I say this, ignoring the fact that the extreme violence Turkey is seeing is relatively recent and that Turkey is considered a developing nation, not a "third-world" nation. “Why don’t we document muggings?,” my friend asked.

We don’t document muggings because (generally) when someone gets mugged they don’t get their limbs torn off. A whole public square doesn’t get leveled by it. Generally, if someone is mugged, the money and fancy wristwatch are all the other person takes. Muggings do not get documented not because they are everyday occurrences, but because they are not tragedies.

These bombings happen in tourist locales. They happen in train stations. They happen in public areas where innocent civilians are just trying to do their daily activities. And though these civilians may be people of color, poor and weary from an unstable government, they are still innocent civilians – people with families, people with dreams. If we can be upset that American troops are being killed over in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can afford a little sympathy for the innocent people who live there that are also being terrorized.

And you bet that if there were a war going on in the United States like the one in Syria, even if it had been going on for years, it would be plastered all over the news.

I would really like to know where this idea began. Which newsroom was it where an editor first said to someone documenting a story like the Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria, “Nah, that’s too depressing for a headline, let’s talk about the Rolling Stones instead?”

And therein lies the problem. We can only talk about tragedy if it can be directly related back to us. We sympathize with Brussels because the people look more like “us,” “we” being a white Christian nation with a lot of money and little civil unrest. We panic because, “Oh my God, that could be us.”

We panic because white people are the victims here, part of a war they think they have no part in. But we do have a part in it. We contribute to it every time we turn a blind eye, every time we see a news article about a bombing in Syria, shake our heads, and look up cat videos instead because "it's just too sad." These wars happen because we ignore them, and in ignoring them, we remain ignorant and allow the violence to continue. But we all know what happened the last time we said it was fine for a government to kill its own people.

The answer doesn't have to mean sending troops. Sometimes it's just educating yourself and the public, and giving the conflict your full attention. People are dying, and it's time you cared.