Some weird responses to the LA fires
CW: If you or anyone close to you is/was directly affected by the LA fires, you may want to know I’m including some of the unkind comments I’ve seen about it in this first section, in case you want to skip to the ‘Why Were They Responding This Way? ‘ section.
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Did you notice how many people, in response to the LA fires and people losing their homes, displayed a shocking amount of apathy, or sometimes even cruelty?
Some comments I saw included:
‘I don’t care if someone’s losing their second or third home.’
and
‘Now they can find out what feeling homeless is like.’
and
‘Well, they have enough money to build a new house, when I can barely afford my rent.’
For the record, I absolutely don’t agree with anyone implying or outright stating that it doesn’t matter that these homes burnt down regardless of how rich anyone was, not to mention the multiple knock-on effects to the whole area.
Today, I want to explore a possible reason why they might respond this way, that doesn’t just write them off as arseholes.
Why were they responding this way?
Why were there were so many of this type of response, many from people who otherwise consider themselves kind and caring humans –
Who may have spoken out against what was happening in Gaza, or Congo, or Sudan, or supported those affected by natural disasters in Florida or North Carolina, or any number of other events happening around the world?
We can absolutely say they’re just being uncaring / unkind / etc, but I wonder if at least a part, if not all, of it has to do with our actual limited human capacity.
It’s no secret that the last five, ten, or even 20 years have been A LOT.
Between climate change, multiple genocides, exploitative/slave labour practices, cost of living/inflation crises, the pandemic, etc, etc, we’ve had SO MUCH happen around the world.
Some of these events impact us directly and personally, others wring our hearts out as we see suffering thousands of miles away that we have little ability to change.
As humans, we have real, physiological limitations to our capacity for pretty much everything in our life.
Compassion fatigue and activist burnout are real.
One of our best traits as humans is the empathy we can feel for others, the drive to help people who are suffering and care, listen, and support, but one of the defining traits of being human is that we have limitations – in pretty much everything.
We have limited energy, we have limited mental space, and limited emotional capacity.
We never expected ourselves to care for the whole world
For most of human history, we’ve been limited in how much of the world we’re aware of, and how much of the world we can potentially impact.
We had our small communities, mostly within walking distance, usually about 150 people. That was our realm of awareness, those were the people we felt a responsibility to care for. For most of history the majority of people wouldn’t have any awareness in their day-to-day lives of what people outside their immediate geographical area were experiencing.
Up until very recently (from a human history perspective), our mind, our body, our selves, were never asked to actively care about so many people.
But today, not only are we exposed to tragedies all over the world, if we are caring human beings who see ALL human life as equally precious, we WANT to give each situation equal weight. Caring about one thing more than another feels unjust, inequitable, and as if we’re saying one person’s life is more important than another’s.
Our bodies, our minds, our selves - cannot hold it
Even if the desire is there to hold all the issues in our awareness and support them equally, we simply do not have the capacity.
It’s not unusual – in fact, it’s absolutely common – to be seeing everything that’s going on in the world, all the fires that need to be put out (literal and metaphorical), and feel so overwhelmed by what needs to be done, to feel so insufficient as one person who can’t really change anything on the scale it needs to be changed, that you shut down and do nothing.
When I saw those responses talking about the victims of the LA fires, I saw people who – perhaps – have had their capacity wrung out.
Maybe, in order to not feel like ‘bad people’ they need to justify to themselves (possibly unconsciously?) why they just don’t care about this one.
Maybe they need an excuse to opt out of caring for one more tragedy.
What's the solution?
There is no one-size-fits-all solution here.
Sometimes, by looking at the extremes, we can find the middle ground that’s ‘right’ for us.
Here are some of the unhealthy extremes I’ve noticed in response to many of the things happening in the world over the last few years:
People completely opting out of awareness (100% of the time) to ‘protect their peace’ while doing nothing for any cause or working within their community.
People being hyper-aware of every tragic thing that’s happening around the world to the point where they are incapable of choosing any one thing to take action on, because it feels like nothing they can do would possibly make a big enough difference.
People over-scheduling and over-committing to every cause or organisation they come across to try and help, to the point where they burn themselves out (and possibly traumatise themselves) trying to do everything.
People taking it upon themselves to police and judge other people’s efforts – thinking their activism is bullying other people who aren’t saying or doing what they ‘should’ about the ‘right’ issue.
People neglecting themselves or not allowing themselves any joy or happiness because they feel as long as ‘x’ or ‘y’ group / people are suffering, it’s not right for them to have fun / feel joy.
All of these are unhealthy extremes.
I’m sure you’ve witnessed at least some of these too.
The balance lies somewhere in between
We can look at our current capacity (how many spoons we have, how much pain we’re in, how much disposable income we have, our time and energetic capacity), and decide what we can do. Or, we can assess if we need to and ARE ABLE to create capacity.
We can decide what portion of our capacity should go towards our local, in-person community and what portion should be dedicated to something further afield.
Only you* genuinely know what your capacity is. Only you* can look at yourself and be honest as to whether or not you’re making excuses or hiding or giving an honest assessment on what your capacity is.
Some people are genuinely about to drown in their life, and I wouldn’t expect more from them than keeping their head above water (and maybe asking for help, if there’s anyone who can help).
Others actually do have capacity and instead of focusing time externally do more navel-gazing.
If you’re noticing that you are starting to feel apathy towards suffering that you’re seeing on your screen (i.e. not suffering that’s impacting you, your family, or your local community), it may be time to take a break.
And during that break, you can assess whether you should actually look up local, grassroots organisations in your area that you can start showing up for (again, if you have capacity), and what practices you may need to refill your own cup and have joy in your life.
The hardest work is finding the balance of all these possible directions that both takes care of you as a human (because you deserve to be taken care of – everyone does) and fulfills your responsibility to be a member of your community (without boiling your value down to your productivity – thank you, capitalism).
We are living in difficult times.
And our bodies did not evolve to hold the care, stress, and worry for 8 billion people.
*Only you, and perhaps you have some trusted friends in your life who can help you see any blindspots you may have or excuses you’re making for yourself.
