Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Tragedy, Attention, and You

Here's something I wrote somewhere else back after the last attack on Paris, and I feel that it's applicable again in light of the bloody month the world has had:

By now I should really know better than to be surprised, but Salon's editorials on the Paris attack have been uniformly terrible. There are lots of reasons, some good and some bad, that our media and political classes pay more attention to deaths in France than in places like Lebanon--one of the most significant is simply that more Americans have been to Paris than to Beirut. France is an old ally, and was (is?) our sister republic. France is also deep within NATO, what is normally thought of as a safe zone, while Beirut is on the periphery, right next door to the IS. It's unfortunately not surprising that an attack there doesn't surprise anyone.

If you can't help yourself from trying to drum up a narrative of false balance, all you're doing is handing ammunition over to the bigots you think you're fighting. From their own mouths IS carefully planned and orchestrated this attack, purely to demonstrate their reach and capabilities.

It's a tiresome and moronic whine directed at activists using the BlackLivesMatter that "All Lives Matter!", or that more blacks are killed by other black people than by the police, because both of those things are beside the point. Focusing on an injustice that strikes home to you doesn't negate or dehumanize all the other injustices that are happening at the same time. It's just being a human being to react to the things that hit home, and trying to twist every story into the same narrative is condescending and regressive, especially to the victims you'd like us to remember.

This issue is big and complicated, Salon, and your reporting and opinion pieces have so far been inexcusable. You wouldn't tolerate this sort of grand-standing by the right over the Charleston shooter, and you would be right not too. The fact that you're so wrapped up in your own leftist crusade against imperialism that you can't even separate the cause from the victims is one that you need to come to terms with, and if you can't you should fire your editorial staff and start over. Shame on you.

Substitute place-names as appropriate.