Reaction to tragedy is about skin in the game

CN: All the worst things] It’s been over a week since the shooting at the Pulse. In the first few days I saw a burst of emotions and opinions/thinkpieces; some great some not so great. The event captured the news cycle for what’s considered a long time in 2016 — even for such a mass tragedy. As expected, by now much of the coverage has died down.

Most homepages of mainstream US news sites still have 4-40 mentions of the story but much of the focus has shifted to the implications for elections/policy etc. Australian websites also feature it but a lot less, some mainstream news homepages having no mention. If this is how you consume your news you might think that the world is largely “over” it.

It is still a bigger focus for mainstream LGBT news sites — but it’s in the personal sphere that I’ve seen the most impact. People I know or follow. Social media. Greta Christina has written a great post To Cis/Het People Wondering Why Queers are Freaking Out About Pulse/Orlando. Here’s a bit:

Did you grieve over 9/11, even if you didn’t personally know anyone who was killed?…Did you feel that the attack was an attack on all of us?…Did it make you fear for your own safety?…Did you feel rage and bafflement at the idea of people having that much hatred towards you and people like you?

Fellow non-LGBT people, especially those outside the US. We get to “move on” from our initial reaction by now. We get to have “processed” it in the first 4-5 days. We get to worry about other news now and maybe even think we’re being “objective” there. Nope. How we react to tragedy depends a lot on whether we have skin in the game. And it’s important for those of us with less skin in the game to recognise it. No matter how aware you think you are of LGBT issues, if it’s not personal it really is hard to take it seriously enough. If you don’t try bridge the emotional gap, all of your awareness and goodly opinions might not amount to shit — you might still be tempted to intellectualise things to the point of treating people’s humanity as a debate. Or engage in “they were all human” #alllivesmatter fuckery.

 

Save yourself, mammal!

Now, it’s possible to try breach what’s sadly an empathy gap; to try get more skin in the game. If you’re not LGBT you should. You don’t need to personally know anyone affected or traumatised (although you should NOT assume people in your life are ok just because you’re not specifically aware of anything). I promise you that social media isn’t the timewaster that the smarmy op-eds would have you believe but an unparallelled tool. Get thee to Twitter and see for yourself. Read things beyond mainstream media. Read things from those with more skin in the game than you.

You may want to also think about why we often hear opinions framed as objective vs emotional, who promotes this frame and why. Read the excellent article The Importance Of Getting Emotional About Climate Change And The Reef and apply it to the Pulse tragedy.

Done that? Good. Now one more exercise for feeling someone’s skin in the game.

Imagine the Orlando shooting targeting your community; whatever community you might belong to. Imagine that instead of support there is some derision from the wider community but mostly no response from the international community. That the attacker is not even taken into custody but gets to live out his life, possibly attacking again. That you don’t need to wonder about whether there will be copycat or follow-up attacks because there have been and will be. Imagine that these attacks happen regularly, many of them at the same scale as the Pulse shooting.

Now imagine how much more violence and trauma there would have to be for you to think that your best choice is to leave your country and give all your money to someone so they put you into a rickety boat. Until you do, it’ll be another issue you might be pontificating on intellectually without any reference to skin.

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