​Looking for a brighter future

Adding to push notifications and breaking news headlines Tuesday morning, students received an email from Vice President of Student Affairs Larry Moneta about a set of terrorist attacks in Brussels. These deliberate acts of targeted violence resulted in the deaths of at least 31 individuals and left hundreds more injured.

These attacks are just the most recent in a succession of assaults on European public safety that have astonished the international community and left many in the West understandably fearful, yet astonishingly apathetic. Truly we sympathize and send our prayers, but over time we have become desensitized by these instances of human brutality. Between terrorism, war, gun violence and other tragedies all told in the course of the 24-hour news cycle, we have been worn down by systemic violence, an accepted facet of a 21st century global reality.

We wrote in November following the Paris attacks that “we have the opportunity to decide how we should respond to these tragedies.” Indeed our responses saying something about us and respective communities. While some react by exploiting events for political gain with anti-Muslim xenophobia like Senator Ted Cruz who called for police to “patrol and secure” Muslim neighborhoods, others—more subtly but just as damagingly—pick and choose which calamities to care about. This is no new phenomenon. It happened after Charlie Hebdo, Paris and now Brussels with crises going on simultaneously in Turkey, Syria and around the world. Of course we have greater concern for tragedies that hit closer to home or that shock us. But proximity is no excuse for stopping at that. Being empathetic and caring is not just for the brazen few who feel inspired towards action. They are what make us human.

Why is it so difficult to sit and reflect on each and every tragedy that occurs? Should the world grind to a halt when a bomb goes off or a city razed? The scale of global suffering is often beyond our comprehension, yet even still the unconscious choices we allow ourselves to make in what we pay close attention to and what we scroll past or turn our heads away from need to be brought to light. The effort to join a vigil at the Duke Chapel for those whose lives have been ended is well allocated. The time spent reading about the turmoil behind the Syrian refugee crisis is time well spent. The work performed by volunteering for a local food drive or fundraiser is work worth doing.

We must also allow these events to inform us about the world, how little we truly understand about its seven billion inhabitants and hundreds of countries. We must not permit politicians to exploit our fears, for each life taken to prove a political point is an outrage. We must continue to express our solidarity to all those in suffering. Stand with Brussels. Stand with Ankara. Stand with Paris. Stand with all the places and people living in fear or uncertainty. We are privileged with a world class education and access to some of the finest programs and opportunities to set us on the path to being influential in our lives. These tragedies, both the kinds that grab headlines and that have been humanitarian causes for decades, are neither coming nor going. We must see each and every one of them for what they are, and we best not stand idly by.