Humans are designed to care about each other deeply. Without empathy, generosity and cooperation, we wouldn’t have gotten this far as a species.
But when we are told to see any human, or group of humans, as something else, and when we act on what we are told, we lose a huge piece of our own humanity.
I can’t remember when I first learned this idea: That dehumanizing one another robs us of our own humanity. But I have been furious about it ever since.
I grew up in a society that taught me, or tried to teach me, that many others are sub-human; I don’t need to tell you who they are. Every day, I find myself slamming up against these messages, and reaching beyond them to recognize how connected we are. How what happens to you is happening to me, too.
Covid-19, a tiny virus, understood this better than we do. It emerged in a single city and quickly spread around the globe, killing at least 7 million people worldwide. It burned through all of our lives, disregarding our perceived differences. While many of us go around pretending we don’t need to wear masks and take precautions to protect each other, more still die.
Not protecting each other in a global pandemic makes us less human. But that’s just one example.
As a journalist, I’ve written about what homeless people, immigrants, rape survivors and the disabled and mentally ill experience in this country; the discrimination Black and brown students face in our public schools; what it’s like for people living in oppressive regimes; and so much more. I always try to describe how we got here, how the current systems and people in power created these situations. I’m supposed to be objective, but in truth I’m desperate to make readers care about people who are different from themselves. To think about what it would feel like to live in someone else’s situation.
And every time I see people blaming a group — whether it’s unhoused people, or people undergoing a genocide — I feel like a failure.
I don’t know how to make people, particularly the people in power, care about Chez and his community, living in tents beneath Highway 101 in San Francisco. And I don’t mean pretend to care, to talk about forcing them into shelter and drug abstinence. I mean recognizing that housing, food, healthcare, toilets and hygiene are basic human rights — and if someone is living without those things, it means society has failed them.
I don’t know how to make people care about Shaaban al-Dalou, the young man who was burned alive in an Israeli bombing attack on the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, or about the 43,000 others killed in Palestine in the past year, all of whom were beloved by someone.
Or how to make people care about the increasing violence in Lebanon, or the specific attacks on journalists throughout the region, or my friend Kareem, reporting on it all from Beirut, risking his own life to bear witness and write the truth, even while his colleagues are slaughtered.
I don’t know how to make you care that politicians push us to hate and fear one another.
I don’t know how to make you care about the immigrants in your community, who went through such horrors to get here and just want to make their neighborhoods better.
I don’t know how to make you care that the petroleum industry has turned its back on all of us, and left us to clean up its messes, whether it’s vast wildfires in Australia, California, Oregon, Washington, or Canada (the fire zone grows ever larger), or devastating hurricanes 300 miles from the coast.
And I don’t know how to make you understand that when you turn away from these things, you are not only letting them happen, you are losing a key part of yourself.
It’s not like I am revealing any great mystery here. Almost every religion and spiritual path on this planet teaches us how connected, how interwoven, we are. How much we need each other.
I don’t mean to say that you should only care because it harms you, personally, when you see someone else as less worthy, less deserving, less human. But you should care. And it does harm you.
I know it’s too much to feel. It’s too much to bear witness to it all.
But when we turn toward it, and we feel how unbearable it is, that’s when things begin to change.