I am having a particular thought-circle and I am hoping the kind folks here will help me out. And who knows, maybe this will be helpful to someone else too.
I recently read (and watched the video) about a particularly nonsensical tragedy. I shouldn’t have watched the video because now it’s vividly imprinted in my brain and - because this happened on the other side of the globe and has nothing to do with me - I just can’t figure out how to deal with it. I keep thinking about it, feeling the tragedy for the family involved, feeling angry at the bystanders who didn’t do as much as they could have (I know what I would have done, damn it, and the woman might have survived), and feeling really, really pissed off at the corporation that didn’t perform adequate maintenance, saving a few bucks at the cost of human life.
I’m getting specific here, but that’s not really my intention. I’m just trying to figure out, how does one deal with tragedy related in the news, particularly tragic accidents or oversights, and particularly those which you can do nothing, absolutely nothing about? In this day and age of 24/7 news media and graphic violence casually shown on the airwaves, TV, and internet, this seems like something I really need to know the answer to.
(On the one hand, this is truly mundane and pointless, and on the other hand it’s not. If this is in the wrong forum, let me know.)
All of my news comes from print. Internet and newspaper for local stuff. With print you can choose on what to read. I don’t use a TV. I don’t like to hang out with the tragic stories. Earthquakes, floods, mass murders are bummers. Sometimes I think, maybe there is a master plan, and these events are for population control.
Trust me, neither do I. In this instance, my sister told me about a little about the story and not knowing details was leaving my imagination too active, so I googled it and read everything. Usually, the more I know, the better I’m able to deal, but not this time.
One thing that I have found helpful is making a difference in some way. Maybe you can’t feed starving children in Africa, but you can feed local homeless people. Maybe you can’t fight corruption in foreign governments, but you can fight it in your local school board. Maybe you can’t bring back the dead, but you can save other people from dying.
As a bonus, not only are you helping to make a difference, but you’re also exposing yourself to situations so that you can better cope with it. (As a personal example, seeing a person in medical distress used to make me feel scared and helpless. If I saw a person having a seizure I would cry, if I saw a video of a person committing suicide it stayed haunting my brain for days. I went on to become an EMT, and learning how to helpfully respond in an emergency has made me able to cope with seeing people in medical distress much, much, much better than I could when I was younger.)
Think about what you can do. Either in small influence on the big and distant stuff, or in direct action on your immediate world. Maybe you can’t do much about situation X that you saw in the news, but can you apply your feelings about it to your similar local situation Y?
I think one aspect of my interest in zombie movies is to steel myself to the inevitable horror inherent in this world. We are in the absurd position of being self-aware, selfish beings in rather fragile, breakable bodies, embedded in a natural world composed of uncountable moving parts, a world which never turns its disposition towards us all away from “cold indifference”. If that isn’t a set-up for Bad Things to happen, I don’t know what is.
So. I watch every zombie movie I can. It is gory, unbelievable horror immersion. That’s as used to it as I know how to get without, say, joining the Army (or moving to Syria). The Real McCoy is of course going to be worse. Try to be glad your number hasn’t come up yet. Do something either fun or kind.
Emphasis mine. There’s your problem right there. It’s easy to get sucked into a cycle of unstoppable information gathering that the internet enables, and it can be unhealthy.
Sounds like you want to feel like you make a difference. Perhaps investigating volunteer opportunities in your local community would help in this regard. It may also be good to pull-back from the 24-hour news cycle, and find a media outlet to your liking that may not focus so much on negative stories.
“how does one deal with tragedy related in the news, particularly tragic accidents or oversights, and particularly those which you can do nothing, absolutely nothing about?”
I don’t think the above replies - although very handsome in their content - really address this issue. I see the OP as not being able to ignore the 24-hour news cycle and not being able to do good for every situation that presents itself. You can devote all of your time to helping others, you can become a qualified counsellor and/or work for the UN, you can negate all of the 21st Century’s problems by blocking them out, using drink or drugs or going off-grid and turning into a brilliant madman like Ted Kaczynski, or you can let yourself become completely immersed in the matrix of 21st century life and be concerned with what the latest X-Factor contestant or soap opera character is going to wear tomorrow.
I choose ‘other’, but I also don’t know what that is.
We’re going through another example of this, with the many tragic incidents among the people trying to get into the EU at the moment. If it isn’t drivers abandoning people to suffocate in a locked lorry, it’s a photo of a drowned child washed up on a beach.
The only thing one can do is to divert one’s emotions away from the irremediable that’s already happened, towards practical ways to help, of which (in this case) there are many.
I wish there was some sort of news magazine that just summarized the terrible news briefly, without photos, and expounded on positive happenings. Didn’t Grit used to do this?
To me it’s a matter of “think globally, act locally”. I can’t do anything about lousy maintenance in China or in Lorca (where three people were killed by a falling cornice during the 2011 earthquake), but I can and do act to make sure that my own HOA keeps our facade in good shape or that my coworkers and I wear our hardhats and protective shoes when walking around a factory.
Nava,
who counts a Master’s in Labor Safety among her decorative diplomas.