If I were killed right this moment—shot, stabbed, killed in some way, shape or form—some of you here might feel something: shock, anger, sadness, joy, whathaveyou. You would experience some kind of emotion because we are humans and we have a connection of some sort, regardless of whether you care about what I’m saying here or not. This is a very dramatic example to lead off with, but there is also a point. Bear with me.
If you take the other tens of thousands of people in this area, the other hundreds of thousands in this county, the millions in this state, this country and the seven billion other people in this world, I am just a number. I am not remembered as the weird sometimes cool, sometimes blonde but sometimes red-haired chick that sometimes posts random photos of what I’m doing to mainstay my own self-importance on social media. I graduated in a class of 456 people and walked across the stage not knowing the names of one third of them.
To everyone else in the world, I’m a number. A statistic. A news segment. I am an age followed by a time of death followed by a percentage of life that I still had left. I become a way for people to calculate how this world functions, albeit harshly unfair in the case of my hypothetically untimely demise, and how we deal with violence and distress and grief as a people in this century. I no longer become someone you can relate to. I’m dead now. You all are still here. I have the weight of the world (several, backbreaking tons, or so it feels like sometimes) lifted off of my shoulder while the rest of you still have countless of dollars of student debt you have to worry about, or a mortgage to pay off, or some crazy in-law to avoid at a graduation party or birthday celebration.
I’d become another ping in the abacus of people trying to calculate how high of a number we need to reach before we react, before we do something to demonstrate our compassion to these people that we don’t know but have been impacted by a word we like to call injustice, though it may seem we abuse that word more and more frequently. Nowadays it feels like disaster and grief and turmoil are a constant facet of our lives. People we don’t know—or do know—are dying every day because we know longer know how to talk to people and understand them. Schools put pressure on students to learn lucrative studies, like science and math, while English and history are pushed to the wayside, thus limiting our ability to learn about human connection and apply it to life; something that can’t be done while solving equations or staring through a microscope.
We sit on our phones and text our loved ones instead of calling or visiting them, and we follow Instagram accounts run by people we’ve never met and scoff at the fact that Taylor Swift has yet another boyfriend (more statistics), but we can’t even try to have level-headed discussions about politics and poverty because we’re all convinced that our way is the right way. We’ve spent so much time recently being statistics on gun violence, women’s rights, police brutality, childhood obesity, international terrorism, and countless other issues that we haven’t been able to come to common ground on solving any of them because we refuse to understand each other, or even attempt. We’ve lost an ability to be compassionate with other human beings. We seem to only care about right and wrong, and no one can agree on what that is anymore. And that, along with the countless other things going on in the world right now, good and bad, makes people afraid.
There’s terror in Paris. There’s terror in London. There’s terror in Syria, though it’s not nearly talked about to the extent that it should in the confines of our more privileged society. This privilege isn’t a bad thing, until we become blind to the mistreatment of these other people. All terror is terror, and all fear is fear. But we hide it behind numbers that we can skew to make ourselves feel better about it. There's one thing we still haven't yet realized. This fear can’t be quantified by numbers and percentages.
Symbolic support isn’t real support. Uncertainty has led to people being afraid of each other and afraid to help each other. Saying you stand with someone and actually standing with them are very different concepts, yet nowadays the discrepancies have become grayer and grayer. It’s become a hashtag and a filter on your profile picture while humans in your backyard, or just across the pond, are dying because you couldn’t be bothered to look out the window. It’s become exhausting to go through life and wait for the next statistic to encourage you to feel loss in a situation where the death toll means something entirely different to those who aren’t even alive anymore, or to those who knew them best. Until we learn to lead with compassion and by compassion and at least attempt to understand one another, we won’t be able to alleviate this fear.
We have hundreds of millions of humans living in this country, and billions of humans on this earth. Yet we scarcely know what it means to be one anymore.
