Why we can’t turn away

I just returned to the USA from a long trip overseas that was quite hectic, so I fell behind on my emails and other communications. This included my usual voracious consumption of global and national news. I lamented to some friends my sense of disconnect from current events and they all answered in the same, unexpected, way. The news, they said, is depressing and over sensational and full of negative perspectives. Biased corporate interests drive it. They turned their TVs off a few years ago, they said. They focus on their own lives instead. Ignoring the news is how they stay sane. I should do the same, they urged.

I understand how people feel about the press – it is definitely one in a crowded field of institutions that Americans say have lost credibility with them. I understand the suspicion directed towards the media industrial complex – it is well deserved. I understand that we have more immediate concerns like inflation and gas prices and how we keep our kids safe from America’s epidemic of gun carnage.

But I still feel that factual news from around the country and the world is a necessary part of my diet and that rather than run away from it I must engage it because it is an important part of our human story.

On February 24, 2022, Russian invaded Ukraine. As the war has ground on, I have observed public interest in it shift – from riveted followership of the early weeks to a disinterest as the story has not fundamentally changed and amid updates that the conflict could last years. Ukraine is quickly becoming background noise and many of us are beginning to tune out and look away.

We must not turn away!

Again, I understand this weariness, but I find it even more discouraging than the ever-constant stream of negative news or the media industry itself.

I feel like I have seen this before.

In May 1997, 2 years after I had graduated from Morehouse College and was working in New York City, Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone was overrun with a rebel army. The result was a human carnage of outstanding proportions. My parents and two siblings were still in the city at the time and I remember how much we nationals outside the country scoured and scanned the newscape for every new update that we could find. There was inconsistent global media coverage of the happenings on the ground but word leaked out – as locals found myriad ways to document and share the horrors they were facing daily.

Beset with helplessness and facing daily threats of death, mayhem and rape, my family and other Sierra Leoneans on the ground were amazingly resilient. At the same time, they lived with a hope – that the world was aware of their plight and that someone somewhere would intervene to restore normalcy to their lives. So, they strove diligently against the logistical odds and at personal risk to send accounts, photos, videos to us on the outside. It was the equivalent of a marooned sailor on a remote island laboring to a high point in the terrain to start a fire or set off a flare that would attract desperately needed help – help that would make the difference between life and death.

Sierra Leoneans never gave up, and did not dare to imagine that the rest of the world would, or that the passing helicopter over the marooned island would see the desperate signaling – and then look away, and fly away, anyway, leaving the sailor to his own end.

I cannot explain this better than Martin Luther King did – “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

The more we look away from injustice, the more it spreads, and the more it spreads, the worse it gets.

Yes, I know that the horrible sight and plight of another human being suffering rips our insides out and traumatizes our sensibilities. But it much worse for the sufferers. A mild faint is a small price to pay for hearing their messages of horror and their pleas for help. The answer is never to turn away. It is for us to act with purpose, courage, empathy, and humanity.

In 1955, Mamie Till Bradley made the courageous decision to hold an open-coffin funeral for her murdered son Emmett and by doing so forced the world not to turn away from the sight of bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention not only on U.S. racism and the barbarism of lynching but also on the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy. It energized the civil rights movement.

In 2000, a small international force decisively ended the war in Sierra Leone, but only after the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods over a 10-year period.

War and injustice have an innate urgency that must not be ignored. We all have the ability and the choice to play a role in agitating for action against them – wherever we are.

Whatever we do, we must not turn away.