Aleppo and the coarsening of the conscience

Amidst all of the Facebook newsfeed pictures yesterday of new-fallen snow and Christmas preparation was a British news video with this freeze-frame image:

A screenshot from the homepage of British Channel 4 News, with their report on the ongoing tragedy in Aleppo.

From the subtitles, his name is apparently Ayah. He was wounded in a bombing, trapped in the last open hospital in Aleppo as tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, attempt to flee in the latest imperfect ceasefire to have been declared by the Assad regime. I posted the video to my wall because the sight of his haunted eyes, his dusty, bloodstained face, rends my heart and makes me wish desperately that I could do something, really anything.

It's not that you and I can do nothing at all in response to the climaxing Syrian crisis. There is Catholic Relief Services, for example, if one is able to contribute financially. There's certainly the power of intercessory prayer.

But you most likely know what I mean: There's something about the haunted eyes of a vulnerable child that demands an immediate, physical response. The child needs to be picked up, held close, protected, and loved.

Which is not possible in the case of little Ayah.

Which has me thinking about the hyper-connectivity of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, with their endless images of war, tragedy, suffering, and natural disaster. I'm ashamed to admit that for every image of a suffering person that I've seen in the newspaper and stopped to say a prayer for, I've mindlessly flipped through dozens of pages with similar images; for every email that I've received asking for GoFundMe funds for a person or a family in need that I've actually given money to, for every request for prayers in my newsfeed that I've actually, seriously committed to intercessory prayer, there are scores and scores more requests that I've hurried past.

As recently as a few decades ago, people's experience of current events consisted of print newspaper articles or the 5:30 p.m. newscast. I would imagine that people were affected by what they read in the newspaper or saw in grainy definition on the TV, but there simply wasn't anything like the sad, blinking eyes of little Ayah in a high definition video clip that one could play again and again. Knowing about the world's tragedies in real-time is a very new phenomenon, the affect of which, I think, is a coarsening of the conscience.

We human beings care about each other by nature. It is ingrained from the moment of birth, when we are placed upon our mother's chests and the beautiful bond between mother and child is forged. We grow up in families, where we learn to work together and to help each other, lessons which extend out into the wider community of church, of school, and of any other organizations to which we belong. This network encompasses those who are close to us in terms of geography, and as people move away, the connection fades, and we tend to move on.

Social media, however, keeps people from former places we've lived, studied, etc., close to us even as our real connection to them fades. The 24-hour news cycle makes present to us tragedies and disasters in places to which we have no real connection. Whereas previously the appeals to our care and concern were more limited, now the entire world's suffering is at our fingertips. It's not just Syria, by the way. If your reading ranges as widely as mine, you would also know that a 7.9 earthquake just struck off the coast of Papua New Guinea, that the Yemeni civil war presently has half a million children at risk of starvation, that Boko Haram continues to massacre villagers and kidnap schoolgirls in Nigeria. The list goes on and on.

Again, we human beings care about each other by nature. That's exactly why it is so emotionally draining to have the world's concerns brought into our line of sight every time we turn on the TV or open the computer. Which is why we develop coping mechanisms: We look for the lighter fare from our more distant friends--the cat videos, the baby photos, the funny memes--but sometimes skip over the tougher things that they share. We hurriedly scroll past news stories about ongoing tragedies and disasters rather than actually reading them. I do it more often than I'd like to admit, and I'll bet that you do, too.

What is troubling me, I guess, is that I can't imagine how scrolling past little Ayah, or, if not him, then scores of other similar stories about the years-old war in Syria, has not contributed to a coarsening of my conscience. As much as it's necessary to filter things in our over-connected, information-saturated existence because we simply can't respond to every request, every tragedy, that we become aware of, the very act of filtering is itself a tragedy, a casualty of our surrender to the new, inescapable reality of the digital age.

I also feel strongly that it would be equally tragic to hide my head in the sand, pretending, for example, that Syria isn't happening right now. Which leaves me, I suppose, between a rock and a hard place.

So for now, I'll be praying for Ayah. I can't solve all of Syria's problems, or the world's, but Jesus said, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move," and so I'll start with Ayah, and at the same time I will hug my own children all the closer.