shameless.

a moment of clarity.

words.

"What I saw playing out on Facebook this weekend was a variation on what Nitsuh Abebe called The Game, in this remarkably prescient essay (it really is compulsory reading if you’ve not come across it before): a sort of moral point-scoring competition, whereby demonstrating that you’re the Better Person is more important than the issue at hand. If you’re arguing that our media should be fairer and more thorough in the way it covers foreign tragedy, you have a point. If you’re implying that your Facebook friends are latently racist or callous or morally inferior for shedding tears over Paris or changing their profile picture to a tricolor, you might just be being an asshole. (I say “might” because there certainly are people who genuinely don’t care about what happens to people who don’t share their race or heritage; fuck those people. Obviously.)

 It’s important to think about why you respond the way you do to the news of another suicide bombing in Iraq, if all you do is sigh and turn the page — especially given the extent to which that the deaths of those people are directly connected to the actions of the US and other Western governments. It’s important to remember that politicians and corporations are well aware of the existence of compassion fatigue, and that they use it to expedite policies we might find unconscionable if they were directed at those we hold dear. It’s important to think about how the current state of Africa and the Middle East is, in many ways, a whole lot of postcolonial chickens coming home to roost — and about how colonialism as a whole is enabled by the very fact that people don’t have as much empathy for the suffering of those on foreign shores as they do for people at home.

It’s important to think about why ISIS exists, and why. And it’s important to discuss these things. It’s important to use your brain, because its capacity is far larger than that of your heart. Sadly, those playing The Game on social media are doing neither..."

FLAVORWIRE: We Need to Put More Thought — and Less Shame — Into Our Conversations About Paris and Beirut on Social Media