I wake to a half-dazed terror of missed calls and unread texts that sediment into the terror of the Paris attacks. Thoughts sprout and wilt as I process the unveiling of this city’s promise of safety. It could have been us, one message reads. Place de la Republique hosts many of our preferred venues including Ya Lamaï, eight minutes from Casa Nostra— six if you’re hungry—and ten from Le Petit Cambodge.

The perimeter of concern widens, oscillating from Paris to Burundi to Beirut to Syria to Nigeria and halts midair. I consider other crises that are now seeped into the wallpapers of our psyches. I wake to the rage of others. Outrage over selective attention and grieving. Why was the Facebook safety check activated for Paris and not Beirut?

I am weighed down by the stingy nature of our grief and the habitual erasure of the events that precipitate all these tragedies. There is some understanding that all failures of justice merit denouncing but also too many strikes in the dark, intellectualism their weapon of choice.

All outrage that does not challenge the entire hierarchy of selective grieving but only seeks to gently reshuffle it in one’s favor fuels a timid revolution.

Perhaps we have not evolved out of tribal concern. The world might be too big, too fast to mourn. We grieve for our sense of injured justice but we are at our most human when we mourn in solidarity with our friends, allow their grief to wash through us. When we frankly and durably question why people we care about might care about Burundi, about Garissa, about Beirut. Grief must be contagious before it is pandemic, and our degree of separation is smaller than imagined. 

Our capacity for empathy and attention is not really in question rather how we define our friends and community. The moral failing is our insistence on estrangement from a world that has been villagized to our benefit. The media’s blind spots are many but not beyond our correction. In refusing to acknowledge individual as well as collective blind spots, we are complicit.