The Danger Of Desensitization
We live in a world where bad things happen every day. People do horrible, unspeakable things to one another. They kill one another. They dehumanize one another. Humans, just like any other species have learned to adapt over time in order to survive. Many accept that it’s a dog eat dog world, and let themselves become hardened to the realities of life rather than dealing with their emotions and trying to make a change.
People have become cold to one another. People view entire groups of people dying as a statistic instead of an atrocity. The world has become desensitized, and that’s really dangerous.
In one of my journalism classes, we watched a documentary called, “Reporter.” It’s a really intense film, and those without a strong stomach for reality may find it really hard to watch. It follows a journalist named Nicholas Kristof to the Congo and Darfur and shows what’s happening over there everyday. People starving to the point that moving causes such discomfort that they start screaming because their bodies are too weak and the pain, too severe. You probably just read that and thought, “Yeah I’m aware that people are starving and dying, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” …And that, is desensitization.
When you acknowledge, but almost immediately write off the suffering of others, you lose a little bit of your humanity.
I think it’s safe to say most people have two views of the world. The first is “their world,” what is happening in their lives; their problems, their “stuff.” Then there is “the rest of the world,” which exists, and we know it exists but it’s not really on our radar, because it’s not staring us in the face, as if it’s in another world.
When you hear the statistic “4 million people have been killed from war and starvation in the Congo,” does that impact you? What if I changed it to, “4 million Americans have been killed.” Does that bring it closer to home? I think it’s easy, scarily easy, to disregard things like this. We live in a bubble. As humans, we keep the heavy stuff out, and even when we acknowledge it, we don’t let it sink in. We say, “I know, that’s so sad” and then we go back to what we were doing.
Bombs going off in New York. Civil unrest between police officers and victims of African American descent. We hear about these incidents in our own country and it’s like “Oh no, not again!” But we’re just thinking about the situation in a broad sense. We aren’t thinking about the human life that just ended.
The day we stop caring. The day we stop being sensitive to loss of human life. The day we accept that we can’t change anything. That’s the day the world ends. You can’t have a human race, without humanity, and the day we lose that, is a day I don’t want to be here for.
The only way to create change is to let something affect you to the point that you become compassionate enough to do something about it. So dig a little deeper, find your humanity and let the heavy stuff in. Let it overwhelm you. Let it shock you to your core. Don’t desensitize yourself, because in doing so, you’re losing what makes you a human: the ability to have compassion for others.
