Bedtime Stories: Empathy in the time of Genocide

Privilege, Perspective and Puncturing the Bubble

On Empathy, Privilege and Genocide

Recently I listened to a young middle class English mother complaining to the effect of, a stranger in a public place – could be the shopping queue or the park or a bus – didn’t smile or express friendly acknowledgment of her with her young children. Apparently, that kind of lack of acknowledgment towards cuddly pets and children constituted evidence of an unfriendly nature.

This kind of myopic fishbowl perspective is actually typical of privileged societies where people are pampered and cossetted to such a degree that a world of leafy suburbs, bedtime stories and favourite cuddly toys represents the limits of their universe, and a stranger’s reactions can be judged solely in relation to themselves and what it means for them.

It couldn’t occur to such a person that there are a range of possible explanations for a stranger’s reaction, from bereavement to depression; maybe they lost a child, maybe they were mistreated by a parent, perhaps they are unable to process emotion, or they just received bad news. Who knows?

What struck me the most, and what strikes me repeatedly within such societies, is how people can take offence because somebody looked away or withheld a smile or an expression of affection towards them or theirs. What strikes me repeatedly, is the triviality of perspective, and a world where “empathy” is experienced as part of an easy shared social currency and code that should be bestowed to oil the wheels of everyday interaction so that a mother feels at ease, moving through her bubble.

I wonder whether it is possible for such a person to even conceive that they should perhaps be angry that their government they pay taxes to, is actively complicit, participating in, defending and funding the killing, of other people’s babies; that mothers sit in tents amidst rubble and devastation, counting their losses – home, children, husband; that tiny children wander rootless among same rubble, clutching at nothing, unable to articulate a loss so huge that it is a hole inside them.

I don’t think that people whose world is shrunk to the size of shallow empathy and the petty materialism of their own daily transactions, are able to compute this; but more yet, that they would even care.

So long as their own children sleep safe, and their own world remains soft at the edges.

Privilege

“Privilege is when you think something isn’t a problem because you are not affected personally”. This quote appeared on my social media somewhere in the past few days. Of course, nobody has the bandwidth to be actively aware of every issue they are not affected by personally, so the differentiation of awareness must be based on something.

Maybe it is a broader tendency to empathy and importantly, awareness – and even wider awareness, of the political dynamics at play outside of one’s own everyday existence. And of course, some will say that they are just too “busy” with daily demands, to pay attention to “politics”.

Of course – the broad brushing of Gaza as mere “politics” is just one of thousands of shades of indifference and dismissal of something that doesn’t personally affect one, or even worse, could be inconvenient to acknowledge – whether that is socially, professionally or in any other sense that could be slightly detrimental to ones standing, because don’t you know, standing against mass slaughter can -horror of horrors - get you labelled an anti-semite!

The differentiation of what to be aware of can also be made on the basis of degree; to what degree is this so utterly wrong, unethical, morally reprehensible that it is intolerable?

Thousands of people – this mother very possibly included – who came out for Ukraine, professing their support for and indignation about, this small “defenceless” and Western aligned country being attacked by the big, bad Russia, have been mute about Gaza.

(That’s the big, bad Russia that didn't use white phosphorus; or maximum shrapnel causing explosives; or systematically snipe children in different body parts every day, as “Israel” has done - no one targets children like “Israel” does).

Just under 800 children have been killed in Ukraine since February 2022; and at least 21,000 children killed in Gaza since October 2023, and 1,300-1,600 children survive with amputations; WCNSF unique to Gaza: wounded child no surviving family.

So: if you came out for Ukraine with indignation and you didn’t do the same for Gaza – then you are quite simply a fucking hypocrite, who likely sees the world in shades of skin colour.

One online definition of social privilege, and a reasonably good one, was: “unearned advantages or power connected to a person’s social identity, such as race, gender, class, or wealth”. I would agree; and I would also say that many of the beneficiaries of said advantages are frequently the least aware of them, or of how their social identity is formed from a confluence of advantageous factors that constitute very explicit buffers against the fluctuations that other peoples have to weather.

Fluctuations that tear people’s worlds apart, so that they may be between four walls one day, and scrabbling amongst dirt to find bread mere weeks later; so that they may lose their entire families and be living in tents, solely reliant on the charity or goodwill of people far away, who are uncomprehending about how the accident of birth has lent them their own unearned rights and benefits, that they may be busy calibrating against others of their own society, as they indulge in compulsive comparison, the enemy of satisfaction.

Puncturing the Bubble

Privilege is often a bubble that can only be punctured by the pinprick of real devastation or loss; the size, scope and teeth of our empathy often reveals the limits of our intellectual and emotional worlds, as well as the extent of our indifference or the degree to which we delude ourselves that: maybe those people deserved it, or that this is just the usual middle east politics, or that they are so different to us, it hardly matters.

The bubble we are in though, becomes increasingly thick skinned, when we can shed tears over reality TV contestants being expelled, and reserve our deepest emotions for domestic sized dramas because it makes us feel virtuous to feel sad for others at a nice, manageable scale and we don’t have to feel the dissonance of empathy for those who aren’t even similar to us.

Yes, there are those who have shed tears every day since the Gaza genocide began, at what they have seen on their screens; they have amassed themselves to take initiatives, reach out to the people they see being maimed, starved, slaughtered.

There are people – like Roger Walters, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo – who have real, huge privilege that they have used for those who don’t look like they do, but their anger and indignation didn’t see differences, it saw similarities, it saw real pain, real suffering and real injustice; empathy with teeth, fine consciences inflamed at what they witnessed. Moved, where some just sit, numbed to others suffering.

This is just a simple piece, where I express my own anger towards all those people around me, who know and have known, for nearly 3 years, to some degree or other, about what is happening in Gaza – and also the West Bank – but can’t be bothered to educate themselves, and do not give a damn anyway.

The people who tuck their own kids into bed at night, concerned only for their own comfort, without a thought for the parents digging through rubble with their bare hands to find the remains of their own children; people who cry at reality TV and the world cup but dismiss the darkness thrown over Gaza by their own complicit governments, and don’t trace the thread that connects them to those events; the people who bleated about Ukraine and remained silent over Gaza.

Perhaps somewhere, in some facet of this life or another, their bubble will be punctured and the curtains part, onto the suffering of those other people that they are connected to and yet so easily dismiss.

Free Palestine. Intifada until Liberation.