Mourning the loss of empathy

So, about two weeks ago, most of the world was moved to heartbreak when a photo of a toddler's lifeless body washed upon a shore was distributed to us through the news media.

Alyn Kurdi became the symbol of Syrian refugees who are fleeing, en masse, in hopes of finding safety and a new life in Europe. It was as if we in the West had been mostly unaware of the horrors playing out in Syria, and on the path to safety and hope.

And then, another image surprised many of us. A camerawoman from Hungary was caught, on film, tripping a refugee as he carried his child near the Serbian border. While according to NBC News the camerawoman has written a letter apologizing and claiming to have been in a panic, she was also seen kicking other refugees. I know I wasn't there, but usually when I do something in a "panic," the behavior is isolated and I don't keep doing it. 

Of course, we were all right to be heartbroken by the image of Alyn Kurdi, and we were right to be appalled by footage of the camerawoman tripping and kicking refugees. It's more than about time that we in the West become aware of the tragic and heartbreaking crisis that is the Syrian civil war.

But now that Syrian refugees have our attention, how long will they keep it? How long will it be before those of us who think we should be taking action on this crisis become disinterested, or even start to feel like it's not our problem? After all, don't we have enough to worry about ourselves? If we take in thousands of these refugees, won't they take American jobs? Won't they require all kinds of financial assistance? Shouldn't we take care of our own people first?

I ask these questions, not because I feel this way about the issue, but because any time there is a crisis that rightly draws our attention, all of these questions inevitably follow. What I find interesting about the path of these questions is that if we talk about our own people who need help, it's not long before we start to ask similar questions, and make similar statements. Why can't people take care of themselves? Nobody helps me. I'll bet that person is on drugs--that's why they can't keep a job. That woman on food stamps has an iPhone--my taxes are paying for her to have that?

So, really, even if our government didn't send aid to other countries, we wouldn't really be all that enthusiastic about helping our own people in need either.

While the world mourns the loss of Alyn, I mourn the loss of something bigger and less tangible--our empathy. In a world where many espouse faiths that encourage us to love and help our neighbor, we often close ourselves off from our neighbor, and shun those who need our help. 

When my husband and I talk about what we most want to teach our own daughter, empathy for others is often at the top of the list. We want her to be able to put herself in someone else's shoes. We want her to understand and appreciate her own fortunes, and to understand that not everyone shares those fortunes--even if they have done nothing wrong. 

We live in a terrible time with wonderful potential. We all have the ability to help someone, but many of us are worried about what helping someone else takes from ourselves, and we have come to believe that, regardless of circumstance, people who need our help are not deserving of it. They must have done something to put themselves in the situation, or they must be unwilling to do anything for themselves to get out of it.

Our own personal struggles have made us very cynical. And we have all heard stories about offering money to a homeless person, only to see them walk into the closest liquor store, or climb behind the wheel of a new car down the road.

Aside from fearing being taken advantage of, I think it's very easy to feel that we have worked very hard to get where we are in life, and that we have done so without any help. But come on, have we really? There were a few times I really struggled. I sold plasma a few times. I worked a few food related jobs. I worked my way through college. I had an unexpected medical issue. My mom flaked on me and kicked me out. And through all of these things, there wasn't a lot of help to be found. But there wasn't none. 

We think of helping someone who needs it as requiring a grand gesture, or something we can't afford. We think people who need help want to take everything we have worked hard for. The reality is often quite different. Help for me was a spare bedroom at my grandparents' house. Help was the $25 muffler my then boyfriend bought for my nearly dead Ford Escort. Help was a best friend who offered me a place to stay if I ever got brave enough to run away from the abusive household In which I grew up. 

All of those "helps" were small, but they made a huge difference to me, and there were lots of other ones besides.

A little boy, dead on a distant shore, tugs at our heartstrings for a moment in time. For an instant, the cruelty of an anti-immigration camerawoman reminds us to stand up for our shared humanity. Can you imagine a world in which those moments and instants stretched out a little longer? Can you imagine what it would be like if we remembered for more than those moments and instants that we are all made up of exactly the same stuff?

Healing by the best of intentions: don't let me become my mother

So, every once in a while you run across someone who reminds you of someone else--someone who does nothing but leave a bitter taste in your mouth. It happened to me recently, and it had an unexpected effect on me. I found myself feeling anxious. I found myself feeling angry that this person could potentially hurt someone I dearly love. I also found myself thinking I would do just about anything not to become like that person.

It's important, but sometimes difficult not to dwell on people and things that have negatively impacted you in the past. Thinking about those people and things can become a sort of reminder to arm yourself, become defensive, and to even go on the offensive--even against people and things that would never harm you. It isn't fair to the people you love, but sometimes you keep doing all of these things out of a fear that you don't even consciously know you are feeling. 

You can very easily find yourself becoming things you don't want to be. The people you care about may accept you, but they always wonder when or if you are ever going to be healed, and if you are ever going to stop going into battles your hidden fear and defensiveness create. 

I don't know the answer to that. A life of love, support, freedom and opportunity has healed a lot of wounds. Oddly enough, the darkest and most obvious wounds have been the easiest ones to heal. It's the passive, superficial ones that constantly reopen. Two years of therapy helped me recognize them, but like a "cutter," I seem unable to stop the often destructive habits that started out as defense mechanisms intended to help me run from my past and survive. 

The bitterness and judging behavior I saw in this person reminded me of my mom. 

My mom is a very unhappy person. She's led a difficult life, mostly because of bad decisions, and a failure to take personal responsibility for any of them. She is so dissatisfied with herself and her own life, that she frequently picks at, and tries to talk down other people--even people she claims to care about. She's quick to judge, and she is quick to assure you that whatever you are hoping for will never work out, and it's a complete joke. She's always waiting for an opportunity to say "I told you so." I think that deep down, she knows that her relationships are so poorly formed that she creates problems and delusions that allow her to pick fights and sabotage any hope of having something decent or real with anyone she cares about.

It's sad. Really. I didn't always see this side of her. When I was growing up, we were very close. Right or wrong, we were best friends. It wasn't until maturity and distance drew back the curtains that I could see things about her that made her very difficult to be around. Ultimately, she damaged our relationship beyond repair. 

I don't find myself able to give my mother much credit--and certainly not the credit she feels herself entitled to. But I will concede one thing. I'm sure that she never wanted things to end up the way they have. We haven't spoken in almost six years, and she has a beautiful granddaughter that she will never get to know. That's a harsh set of consequences.

Being a mother is really hard. Sometimes I feel like I am never going to be any good at it. The days when I can't get my daughter to eat a decent meal of any kind, and she is beyond exhausted but refuses to sleep, I find myself struggling and feeling overwhelmed. When I have struggled with other jobs, there has always been the option to give up and walk away. Motherhood isn't like that. A great deal of the time, you can't even take a break. Sometimes, the stress level is so high that I fail. I fail to be the mom, the wife and the person I want to be. I've failed before, but the stakes have never felt so high.

I know the value of everything in my life. I have the opportunity to build a home and life for my family that I never had. I have the chance to forgive myself for big mistakes, and to get over time that I wasted trying to be things I was never meant to be. 

People say it's normal to feel like you're doing a crappy job at parenting from time to time. It's normal to lose your shit and yell sometimes--even if that's the last thing you want to do. I know it's not my job for her to always like me. I know that it's bad for me to always let her have her way, and I try not to find myself on the path of least resistance all the time.

And I don't want to be that wife who let's her past define her successes and failures within her marriage. At a conscious level, I never have any reason to be the harpie that my own self-doubt and unrealistic expectations manifest. 

But every moment I feel myself failing, it is my mother's failures that whisper in the back of my mind and haunt me. I don't want to be that erratic, crazy person who drives my family away with poor coping skills and self-inflicted wounds. Every time I think it's safe to peel the "bandages" off, it seems like I find another layer of damage that stubbornly refuses to heal.

I suppose unexpectedly seeing someone else's "scars," and their potential to cause harm has "freshened the edges" of some of my own wounds, and made me wonder if some wounds ever truly heal. I don't know the answer. I want to believe. But sometimes, the hardest thing you can do is believe in yourself--and that disbelief doesn't harm you as much as it does everyone else. 

When it comes to the way girls dress, we need a different code

So, I have to admit that I really haven't been paying any attention to all the hullabaloo about girls and school dress codes. After all, my little girl is at least a year away from preschool, let alone a regular school classroom. 

I wasn't paying attention at all--until a friend's daughter was stopped by a teacher at school and accused of being dressed in a "come get me" outfit. I've known this 13-year-old's mother since first grade. The last thing her daughter would ever wear is an outfit that says "come get me." And really, just what is a "come get me" outfit? 

Naturally, she was more than a little upset about the incident. 

My mom used to talk about the dress code for girls where she went to school. They weren't allowed to wear pants. It seemed like a million years ago to me when I was growing up. I honestly don't remember many restrictions associated with clothing when I was going to school. In fact, the only ones I do remember were that boys couldn't wear hats to school, and we weren't allowed to wear Spuds McKenzie clothing because of its association with beer. 

I was a little bit of an odd ball. I helped start a petition to allow the boys to wear their hats. 

The other thing I remember a lot about getting dressed for school is that it was my first awareness that some families had more and nicer things than others. Kids with the nicer clothes often were more popular. It took me a long time to learn that I couldn't just worm my way into those popular groups with my winning personality. It took an even longer time for me to get over that lesson.

Like it or not, what we wear tends to define who we are in the eyes of others. It's very upsetting that society seems to be unwilling to shift from the idea that girls and women are in some way trying to draw sexual advances and judgement unless their bodies are covered up. 

I think we believe we are doing our girls and boys some kind of favor by restricting girls' clothing based on the amount of skin showing, or the shape of the body part that can be discerned. What we are actually doing is teaching them that girls and women are responsible for deflecting unwanted sexual attention from boys and men. We are teaching boys that if a girl or woman fails to cover herself up "appropriately," she is asking for boys and men to "come get her." And we are teaching them both that boys and men cannot, should not and will not be expected to exert any self control.

We've been teaching these lessons for too long. I would hazard to guess that there is not one mother or father who wants their daughter to become the victim of rape. I would also guess that there is no parent who wants their son to be a perpetrator of such a crime. So, why do we keep teaching these terrible lessons? 

The thing about these lessons that perplexes me most, is that we tell girls they shouldn't wear clothing that shows too much skin or that accentuates certain parts of their bodies, but when I go to shop--even for my toddler--skirts are short, shorts are short, jeans are "skinny," and many other items are miniature adult-wear. 

Our magazines sell sexuality. Our television shows and other entertainment sell sexuality. Family values centered companies like Carl's and Hardee's burgers sell bacon cheeseburgers with ketchup and mayonnaise dripping on women's cleavage. How are our kids supposed to understand all of these mixed messages? 

The answer is that they don't. I know I don't, and I am in my forties. 

My daughter hasn't begun to show an interest in clothing yet. Mostly, she fights getting dressed, and the only things she pays attention to are the stay tabs on her diaper or any embellishment with which she can fiddle. I try to dress her in clothes in which she can easily play. My goal is to let her be a kid for as long as possible where clothing is concerned. But when she starts to show an interest in clothing, I am going to challenge myself not to restrict her. 

We live in a nation with great potential to uplift women and girls, and to set an example for the rest of the world. We often hear of terrible crimes and acts perpetrated against women and girls in less developed nations. These are usually based on the same ideals that if women and girls choose not to dress or act appropriately in the eyes of men, they are fair game. And while I agree that in many respects, being born a girl in the United States translates to many freedoms and assumed protections that we take for granted, women and girls are still being told--everyday--that they are not worthy of managing their own bodies and life choices--even down to what they wear. 

When I think of the hypocrisy with which we treat women and girls in respect to sexuality, safety and freedom, I wonder why we think we have the right to declare ourselves so much better. 

I know biases are difficult to overcome. I, myself, think about how women dress and feel silent judgement. I often fear that because of a culture that emphasizes the idea of the "temptress" from school age to adulthood, that young girls and women start to take the easy route. When we want attention fast, oversexualized attire and behavior will usually get it. Of course, this feeds the beast--the one that convinces some women and girls that the only attention they can get, and that they are worthy of is attention to their appearance and their bodies. And restrictive dress codes based on skin and body parts are one place where these ideas get their start. 

The sad reality is that as long as we keep teaching our kids that girls and women are "asking" for someone to "come get" them, our world is not going to become safer for girls and women. It will continue to be a place where, especially as a former victim, I will be worried about how my daughter chooses to dress. It isn't right, and it isn't fair that girls and women have to do things our boys and men are not expected to do. They have to exert self-control. They have to limit their own self-expression. They have to dress and behave defensively. 

For me, the easiest answer would be universal implementation of school uniforms--not to ensure that girls are "properly covered," but to level the playing field. If girls can't freely choose what they wear to school because it might interfere with learning, then boys shouldn't have that choice either. 

The real and honest truth about sexual violence is that it isn't caused by what a girl or woman is wearing. It is caused, at least in part, by the perpetual education of boys and men that they are not responsible for their urges or actions. If you were a sexual predator, and you knew that there was an outside chance that the person you raped would be shamed and blamed for provoking the rape, would you take that chance? I don't know. But it's a scenario that some rape victims face when it comes to seeking justice against their rapists. What was she wearing? How much did she drink? Was she flirting?

If we want to raise strong, independent women who can go out and take over the world, we need to recognize the harm we are doing, and the lessons we teach that discourage them. If we want victims of sexual abuse, domestic violence, emotional abuse and sexual violence to come forward and to know they aren't to blame, we need to teach them that nothing they wear, do, or say is justification for a man to do these things--ever. If we want women to be strong and confident in their own skin, we need to stop teaching them their skin and their bodies are somehow dangerous. 

No one wears a "come get me" outfit. No one says "come get me." So, when are we going to stop teaching our girls and boys that they do? 

Refuse to look away

 So, there's a saying that goes "if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." 

Very occasionally, I get called out for sharing too much "doom and gloom" on my own Facebook page. I suppose I find myself feeling outrage more frequently than is comfortable for others.

The United States media has finally started to respond to the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe, and the most prominent example has been a photo of a little boy, drowned and washed up on a beach. CNN posted the photo on their social media outlets, and there was immediately a backlash against them for doing so.

The backlash against the news media for sharing the photo infuriates me. Why? Because if our news organizations were doing their real job, we would probably all be feeling a little more squeamish and a little more outraged quite a bit more often. Instead, our news organizations are reduced to feature factories, and they only give us what we want to see. 

And if you believe what you see news organizations posting on social media most of the time, the only things we really are interested in seeing are stories about celebrities, bad boy politicians and whatever the sensationalist reality star of the week has to offer. I know that I am not the only one who sees all this garbage and asks "where is the news?".

Do you wonder why it's so easy for Americans to say that we should just go after extremist groups like ISIS? It's because we rarely have to see what the outcome of "going after" people is. We don't have to see thousands of our citizens under siege on a daily basis. We don't have to fear for our lives to go to the grocery store, where the shelves are often empty. We don't have to consider fleeing our homes for foreign lands because our own country has become too dangerous to hope for a future.

If our journalists were allowed and encouraged to do their jobs as intended, we would have a much better grasp on how to be grateful for the relative comfort and safety we enjoy compared to so many other corners of the world. 

A lot of people are also asking why Europe should be expected to take in so many of these refugees, and not neighboring countries. On some levels, that is a valid protest. After all, Europe has become the "go to" for much of the world's "tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free." While on vacation in Ireland a couple of times, we have witnessed the resentment against foreign immigrants who are welcomed and who often receive government assistance. 

On the other hand the West, including and especially the United States, bears at least some responsibility for foreign policies that have taken an unstable area of the world and destabilized it even further. Somehow, many of us still believe that our interests outweigh the lives of innocent men, women and children. And yes, there are plenty of innocents, including Alyn Kurdi--that little boy on the beach. They are just like you and me and our own children--trying to live their lives and get through day-to-day. Only they are under the constant threat of gunfire, violence, food shortages and inconceivable fear. 

But up until this week, we didn't have to face any of it. We didn't have to see the bodies of drowned toddlers washed up on a beach. We didn't have to think about the pain and suffering of others, thousands of miles away. Out of sight, out of mind. 

Very recently I ran across a quote by a college professor that seemed very comforting and reassuring: 

"You all have a little bit of 'I want to save the world' in you, that's why you're here, in college. I want to tell you that it's okay if you only save one person, and it's okay if that person is you."

I took comfort in the quote because it gave me permission to continue working on restoring what has been broken about myself, without worrying so much about the rest of the world. It was comforting to be given permission not to be strong enough, at this time, to take action on behalf of my fellow man or woman. And though the statement doesn't say it, one might even feel permitted to look away from that which is too much to deal with right now.

Sadly, I think we all give ourselves permission to look away, even when we do possess the wherewithal to make a difference for others. We live in a climate that makes it okay to be more concerned about what someone in need might take from us, even if we have nothing for them to take, than what we can offer to give to them freely. In a world where one percent of our nation's population possesses the majority of the wealth, how does it make sense that so many among the remaining ninety-nine percent of us feel so threatened by a single mom who needs food stamps? Calls for drug testing are raised by people who are, themselves, living paycheck to paycheck. We automatically assume that a person who needs help could not possibly have a legitimate claim, even though we might very well be in their shoes if the right set of circumstances befell us.

We had guests from out of town over the Fourth of July this year. In the course of conversation, my husband mentioned having seen real poverty in our neck of the woods. One of our friends posed the question: "what are you doing about it?" The answer, though honest, was embarrassing. Nothing. I know that I talked about intentions--most to be fulfilled when we were done "saving ourselves." 

I think we get so caught up in "saving ourselves" and protecting what's mine that we forget we are part of a bigger picture. Even if we don't all share the same god, or share a god at all, we should at least be able to share our humanity.

A friend reminded me today that a very wise man once said "We can be the generation that no longer accepts that an accident of latitude determines whether a child lives or dies. But will we be that generation?"

That statement applies to more than the children of Sub-Saharan Africa that Bono was talking about. We have the power to do the very simplest thing: Refuse to look away. Even when the image angers you--especially when it angers you--refuse to look away. Even when the image brings tears to your eyes, and makes you hug your own children tighter--refuse to look away. Refuse to look away.

So, yes, I am still working on "saving myself" a little. But, I was wrong about something. I was wrong to agree that I am doing nothing. I do refuse to look away, and sometimes, I hope I am not the only one who sees and tries to give those visions a voice.