Have we lost our capacity to grieve...

It was terrible to watch a man being dragged to a terrible death on the TV screens. It mattered not that he had been one of the world’s most noted dictators. He was still a human being who deserved dignity and justice even in death. It was even worse to watch a toddler run over by vehicles before being dragged aside by a sanitation worker. She eventually died of her injuries a few days later.

Violence dominates our TV screens every day. Every day, news come wrapped in mayhem, death and bloodshed. We don’t seem to mind. It seems palatable enough to watch while eating. Children included. The world it seems, has lost its capacity to be shocked, to grieve..what can we do? It would have been unthinkable to be so untouched by another’s pain in days gone by. People were shocked when something terrible happened to someone, even a stranger. They were concerned enough to worry about it. They cared about the affected family, they mourned alongside.

Being concerned about another’s pain came naturally. It was not something to be savoured on evening news. It was not something to be taken with the morning tea, only to be casually forgotten in the hustle and bustle of the day.

Immune to pain of others

We used to worry about other people. It was customary for friends and family to watch out for one another. If someone’s been gone for a while, it was natural to make inquiries. That no longer is the norm. We lead such busy lives that we would not know if the next door neighbour has passed away. Even if we did, all it would require is a polite visit to the funeral.

The inability to empathize with the pain of others in a society rendered numb, is a tragedy we must confront. Thankfully, there are still a few left who care enough to ensure that all are not anaesthetized to pain. In Sri Lanka, people still care enough to take the injured of a motor accident to hospital. People care enough to answer the call for help in emergencies.

The tragedy of this is that the children are watching us. They are picking up the cues, the pointers. When we as parents are immune to pain of others and can skip over it on TV news, they learn to follow. To add fuel to fire, the globally popular TV programmes are making blood and mayhem the daily palette. Some of them like Dexter and CSI, immensely popular among worldwide audiences, feature bloodshed and crime on a daily basis. It is lapped up and even celebrated, with Dexter emerging an all time winner at TV awards.

Grief and shock

It is imperative that we persuade children to watch shows that do not contain violence or minimum doses of it, if they so insist. There are internationally acclaimed shows that do not contain any or little violence and children must be encouraged to watch such shows. We should ideally pass on empathy as a vital area of concern to our children.

If hundreds who walk by on a busy day will not notice a hapless toddler trapped under moving vehicles, then there’s something very wrong. Following the death of the toddler, there was an outpouring of grief and shock on the internet as Chinese bloggers wondered out loud just how bad things have become. It could have happened not just in China but anywhere else; modern day societies have become so focused on themselves that others do not seem to matter enough to warrant attention of any sort.

Toddler’s death

Soul-searching is important when something like that benumbs a nation’s capacity to grieve. To ensure that such things will not be permitted to happen again.

There must be something that will come out of a horrifying accident such as a toddler’s death. It must ideally spur a society to ensure people will care, will be concerned for another in society.

During the 2004 tsunami, for every good Samaritan who reached out to a fellow human being, there were the vultures who grabbed at the gold jewellery of the dying victims.

There was even a case reported where two youth took the gold chain of a victim before carelessly throwing her, half dead, back into the sea. Compassion was not the best virtue of the hour at the time. People turned into vultures, driven by greed, forgetting in the process that it could have been any one of them.

If as individuals, we can stop, take a break from our self-focused rituals and pause for a moment to ponder - how have we become so immunized against another’s pain. Why the hearts are frozen..why the people no longer bother about anyone else. Maybe the answer lies within each of us to find a thread of compassion in our hearts.