في هذه القضية

For this month’s Editor’s Note, I have nothing to say about our usual topics. As we close this issue, amidst the deepest reflections and the most mundane thoughts that our days are made of, there is a war that is ongoing. An absurd war—like all wars.

The world is watching live, this gratuitous, unmeasured violence based on decades of conflicts. I don’t claim to understand what is going on fully, but the world is witnessing the admirable courage and resistance of a people willing to fight to the end for their identity and the greater good of freedom.

Amongst the horrifying headlines and images online, and cyber bombs thrown by keyboard warriors, I came upon a post by writer Xochitl Gonzalez in The Atlantic. It was titled, simply, “What Happened to Empathy?” Gonzalez writes: “Empathy is cultivated through interactions with people we don’t know well, those glimpses into other interior worlds. We have, over the past two decades—slowly and then quickly—‘optimized’ other people out of our lives. One app at a time, we’ve greatly reduced our need to casually engage with anyone we don’t know—or even to meaningfully engage with those we do.”

On a certain level, I understand this. The world can often feel too big and too messy that you just want to shut out the news, tune out the noise, and hide under your blanket. The only problem is when everybody else starts to get filtered out.

Gonzalez continues: “We have manicured out our lives and our feeds and our day-to-day existence the need for any and all interactions with anyone who has not been hand-picked by us, who is not of the same class or race or political position. We have found more and more ways to avoid engaging with others of our species. And in doing so, we have eroded our empathy.”

As the world is crashing in, our hearts are breaking yet we don’t know what to do. I don’t have any revolutionary suggestions to give apart from be kind and take in as much of others’ experiences as your heart can take.

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