On Empathy for Folks in the Media

Today, an acquaintance of mine was talking on Facebook about Honey Boo Boo and her family being in a car accident on Monday night. Some people were indignant about even caring, and criticized the original poster about even mentioning it when there are other people in the world more "worthy" of sympathy or empathy. Another commenter even went so far as to wish the Boo Boo family "poorly" instead of wishing them well. As a follow-up empathy "test", the original poster shared a link to a news story about O.J. Simpson's apparent brain cancer.

People are people. Everybody hurts. I don't wish cancer on anyone. If O.J. has cancer, then my condolences go out to him for the suffering he has to experience. What is required of me beyond that? He's not a "real" person in my mind—he's a media projection with whom I have no relationship. He's too abstract and has turned into a caricature (either by his own choice or by the whole media machine, or both). I mean, of course he's a "real" person, but I only know about him because of the media. By the time I get back to work in a few minutes (after I've finished this post), I won't think about O.J. and his potential cancer diagnosis. Does that mean I lack empathy? I don't think so.

Empathy/compassion/etc. is cultivated choice by choice, I believe. And in this media-heavy, information-saturated age, it's important to balance our intake of such information lest we totally fracture or numb ourselves out on all the people we can cry with or vilify. Every day on Facebook—multiple times a day, even—I see posts that truly hurt my heart, status updates of people dying, people being sick, people wandering off and curling up somewhere and dying. Last night, in fact, I couldn't sleep well, thinking about someone I once knew years ago who was missing for two months and was discovered deceased on New Year's Day. I watched all this unfold over Facebook (and on the news) from the time she went missing in October; I had to unfollow the Facebook page because I was fretting about it *constantly*.


It's best to be cautiously aware of what's going on in the world, but if we're not alive to our next-door neighbour, local barista, co-workers, bankers, as well as our spouses, our children, etc. and their basic needs or potential suffering, then what does *that* say about our empathy? That's a far more accurate, real-world test.

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