Pancakes and Grief

Today was one of those pleasantly delayed Sunday mornings. I made pancakes while the sun struggled through the last remnants of cloud. The winds last night were intimidating; last night I returned home to the sound of chainsaws clearing a split and toppled tree a block away. I felt strangely proud of the beautiful trees the lined our street for surviving it all. The sky took on a crisp blue colour.
As I stirred pancake batter and preheated the fry pan, the television murmured in the living room. I couldn’t hear it. The kitchen fan was on. As the batter rose and browned, my attention was diverted by sounds from the adjacent room. Tears. Grief. Amnesty International was telling the story of a child left for dead beside some railroad tracks, raped with eyes gouged out. I attempted to console my partner in the panicked please-don’t-cry manner that we men gravitate so naturally toward. I listened for a while to the story unfolding on the television, the phone numbers that flashed on the screen, the pleas by celebrity sponsors asking for support and help.
It all made me feel very uneasy.
Not that I question the work that Amnesty International does. What disturbs me is the program I am witnessing: it is effective, emotional, tear-provoking, and implies the existence of human rights abuses in every corner of the globe. Am I bothered by the facts that are being uncovered? Yes, but those facts are almost beside the point. Catastrophe and cruelty are not revelations. The program is simply pulling back the veil that hides them. In so doing, the message derives from an implicit comparison: the difference between viewer and viewed, subject and object, the privileged Westerner and the suffering “other”.
It works. After watching that program, it is almost impossible not to feel driven to call, donate money, make a difference. It is a feeling derived primarily out of guilt – for being privileged, wealthy, and Western. Our feelings come not out of a sense of solidarity and equality with all humans. We are not one of “them”. It is that very fact that drives us to donate, write letters, drive change. I felt guilt because the things I take for granted are absent from the lives of others.
It struck me as I watched that there was one implicit assumption being made as the program unfolded, one obvious emotion that surprisingly did not appear to be in play: empathy. How could that be? As I watched the mother crying for her lost daughter, the homeless street children, the forgotten and abused, there didn’t appear to be much attempt to have the viewer imagine the suffering and sadness that had been experienced. Was it assumed that we are beyond empathy, beyond feeling? Am I too hardened to such appeals to sense an outreach to empathy? Or is an appeal to guilt more effective?
In the end, perhaps it doesn’t matter. If the program is successful in gaining donations, then does the rest matter? Perhaps not. I only watched for a few minutes before returning to my pancakes. The tears in our house did not result in a donation. For my part, it seemed suddenly that there was inequality, abuse, and violence taking place in every corner of the world. Could it really change if people are so violent and savage? And how did the people feel who were being filmed as they were obviously drawn into situations that would cause them grief ? The mother of the girl who was raped and left for dead by the railroad tracks was brought to the place her daughter was found. She broke down before her younger daughter who looked on with a confused expression. Was exposing that woman’s grief on television – making a spectacle of her pain – worth the money that would be donated?
I suppose there is no other way to appeal to our wallets with success. Perhaps that, most of all, was what disturbed me the most.