By Lee Rodriguez
Editorials featured in the Forum section are solely the opinions of their individual authors.
My only two cousins have lived in Beirut for almost their whole lives. They grew up worrying about a very different set of things than my family. Whether here in America or even Peru, I’ve never faced the safety concerns as fundamental as my cousins did.
I do not like to open up about my storied background, and much less draw attention to myself. But it’s never okay to reduce tragedy and suffering to a punchline, no matter where it’s happening or whether the broad strategic or political aims of such horrors align with an opinion of yours. I’m not neutral on insensitivity. And those of us with a conscience shouldn’t be either.
War and catastrophe have been trivialized our entire lives in all of the textbooks and news stories we’ve watched and learned from. We are finally entering an age where people who are victims to atrocities can directly tell their stories without filter or censorship. Through the ready availability of primary sources during wartime by internet, creating the first so-called “social media wars” — we can finally grasp that war and atrocity give a select few and privileged in power the chance for personal enrichment. They leave 99.9% of the common people in the world reeling from the power grabs made by those .1% on a chessboard — whose owners enjoy the luxury of weaponizing human atrocity through the detached jargon of operational command and discussion of outcomes. We owe our fellow humans around the world a basic sensitivity and decency to our discussions of their traumas, and certainly should give them more of that than our political leaders.
There is so much more that brings together the common people in the world than divides us. We can all put a unified front against the trivialization of our suffering by those in power, regardless of creed. Everyone’s voice matters, even the tone in which we speak about matters like this. Because how we talk about things is what trickles up to our top brass. Let me explain further.
The less we let ourselves be appealed to by politicians’ harmful rhetoric, the more we can change the way these things are spoken about and bring back the ultimate common element of all people in the world: a desire to stop our fellow humans from paying the price for the board games of the few. By guiding our tone in discourse towards unity, we can begin to influence real policy as a result. We want to stop our communities from being destroyed by governing elites who play golf in between their air-conditioned meetings with suits and military operatives. We want to live peacefully without anguish from losing our loved ones — is that really so much to ask? If there is a bone of sensibility in our shared spirit, we would all agree that such suffering should never be experienced by anyone. These are basic desires of people regardless of where they live or who they pray to or don’t pray to or what political leader is in power over them. We are so much more alike than we are apart in our common dreams.
Every single one of us has the individual power to change the manner with which these things are discussed. Every single one of us can think twice about the nationalistic and divisive rhetoric we hear and make a choice about how to contribute to the discourse in this country: whether to continue our tired tendencies to whitewash and normalize, or to take a stand against global suffering, by returning humanity to our political chessboard.