The Brussels Bombings
The bombings in Belgium happened today- 30 people died in explosions in the airport and in a subway station. The Paris bombings just happened in November, and I remember the huge outpouring of sympathy in the wake of those attacks. CERN put all of the member-state flags at half mast for an entire week. There were huge amounts of articles posted to Facebook about it by everyone I knew. I remember telling all of my roommates as soon as it happened, and asking them what it meant for the future, and how this would change Europe. I remember the response from the UK parliament a few weeks later when it voted to begin doing air strikes in Syria, in part as an act of solidarity with France.
Belgium doesn't seem to be creating the same kind of reaction, and I wonder why? There is no facebook app to overlay your profile picture with the Belgian flag. I didn't hear much from my colleagues, and the flags today were not at half mast.
Maybe it's because CERN has a much larger workforce of French people than Belgian people, so it affected the community here much more directly. Maybe it's because Paris is a hub of Western civilization- everyone knows about the city and its monuments. The city symbolizes art and culture and history and philosophy in the collective psyche. The attack may have felt like much more of an attack on the West's way of life than the attack on Brussels, which doesn't have the same kind of cultural capital, at least in the common American's mind. But I honestly don't know- Brussels is one of the seats of the EU. It's not lacking in symbolic appeal. But it may just not be as well as known.
Approaching it with that mindset, the more muted reaction becomes more about the 'relevancy' of the attack to our own lives. That's a weird term to use when talking about a terrorist attack. But there are so many tragedies going on all over the world, many worse than the attacks in Belgium, and we don't hear about them because they are not relevant to our lives. It feels wrong to say that. Like these attacks should be just as relevant. But I don't know then where that should stop. Does that mean my empathy should increase to encompass the entire world? Could a person even function if they felt every tragedy in the world with the same kind of heaviness as so many people did during the Paris attacks?
It reminds me of this article about how Facebook responded to the Paris bombings by enabling Safety Check for people in the area, but they didn't do anything for the bombings in Ankara, Turkey.
Facebook gets to make a decision on what tragedies they emphasize. They can't bum out all of their users out by constantly reminding them of all the acts of terror happening all over the world. Could they change the tragedy emphasized based on location? Relevancy of an atrocity to their users based on stated interests and friends? The thing the above article points out is that these kinds of decisions are inherently political. The world is a lot flatter now, and we can pay attention to what's happening in it at all times, whenever we want. But our own personal attention is still limited. And our hearts can only take so much suffering.