This war has a popular label and a political label, but it’s not accurate. Terrorism is a means of power projection, it’s a weapon, it’s a tool of war. Think of it as our enemy’s stealth bomber. This is no more a war on terrorism than World War II was a war on submarines. It’s not just semantics … Words have meaning. And these words are leading us down to the wrong concept.
Lieutenant General Wallace Gregson, quoted by Britt Blaser
I can’t find it in myself to care about the at-least-50 people who died in the London bombings two days ago. For that matter, I couldn’t care about the almost 200 killed in Madrid or the almost 3,000 who died in New York. Certainly it’s sad that human beings died, but I didn’t know them. I would care if anyone I know died. If I know anyone who lost someone in these attacks, my heart is with you. But it’s not with the thousands of people I don’t know, who lost someone.
And for that matter, why should I care? What makes these 3,250 people’s lives more important than, say, the hundreds of thousands who starve to death every year because our agribusiness is more important than their livelihoods? Or the millions of Americans whose lives are torn apart by the idiocy of the drug war? Oh, that’s right: they’re white, and the brown people did it. It’s not that the grief for the people killed in London is racist, but the fact that we care so much more about this tragedy than the thousands of others happening daily makes me sick.
A friend proposed another explanation yesterday. When a few people set bombs that kill 50, we have a very short chain of cause and effect, and we can point to the people responsible. When we refuse aid to organizations that promote the use of condoms, and five years later, a quarter of Africa has AIDS, the chain of causality is longer, and more people were involved: it’s harder to pin the blame on any one person. When we vote for a war on drugs, and fifteen years later a third of the black population has been in prison, not only is it harder to follow the causal chain, when we finally come to its beginning, we find ourselves. It’s really hard to admit that, yes, I had a hand in causing this tragedy.
But no matter which psychological reason explains our grief for Londoners rather than Africans, I can’t make myself believe that 50 lives have different values in different places. I have only a certain amount of energy that I can use for grieving, and it has to be split up among all of the world’s unnecessary pain. 50 Londoners just don’t deserve that much.
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