Trigger Warning
I’ve been perplexed for a long time by the whole idea of trigger warnings. They seem to exist somewhere between self-protection and self-absorption. It shouldn’t surprise us at all that an encounter with someone else’s suffering, either through self-harm or at the hand of some grave injustice, would make us very upset. It’s the idea that we should turn away from this suffering, or even ignore it altogether, that troubles me.
That’s what trigger warnings do. They make us turn away. They make us ignore bad things. They make us incapable of dealing with suffering. Both ours and that of others.
I will not get political here, but just before a news report of children starving in Gaza the reader warned that images about to be shown may be upsetting to some viewers. Of course such images are upsetting. They’re starving children. We shouldn’t be invited to turn away, we should be held down and made to look at them.
Encountering the suffering of others and being deeply hurt by it is where empathy comes from. Empathy makes us act, to both fully feel and then to try to end the suffering of others. To protest that by being presented with something that pains us, or simply offends us, is wrong, and that we should be protected from such offense, is simply a way to bury our heads in the sand in an act of very fearful, very selfish, withdrawal that will only result in the offense continuing and absolve us of any role in the suffering it causes.
But we’ll be fine in our own little world where nothing bad or challenging ever happens.
Empathy is essential — and yet we’re not built for constant bombardment with the suffering of others that the media delivers so relentlessly. Yes, suffering is worldwide, and it is horrible, and all too much of it is preventable. But we end up getting desensitized to it due to the frequency of it…I have no solution.
It is a genocide. Trump and Netanyahu enjoy the cruelty, but they also want to turn that land into a resort, as Trump said, and this is how they are doing it. And ethnic cleansing is also being attempted in the US -- stripped of all Constitutional rights. When they ask us what we would have done 100 yrs ago when Hitler was ravaging Europe and exterminating the Jews -- we should ask what we are doing *now.* Netanyahu and Trump are best buddies and are engineering this. We feel helpless and overwhelmed and scared and frozen. Trump is now trying to criminalize mental illness. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-condemns-trump-executive-order-targeting-disabled-and-unhoused-people No one is safe.