Recently, Bryan wrote an article
titled “Why We Need to Act” for the Gasha blog. By and large, I agree
with Bryan’s points as I, by and large, am apt to do. There’s one
part that stuck out to me though, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately.
He was talking about a recent viral
video featuring Karen Klein, a school bus monitor in New York that
was harassed by some middle school students. After this video became
public and well-known, an online fundraiser was started for her that
raised $600,000.
Now, your initial reaction might be
somewhat similar to mine, which was, “That is way too much money.”
I don’t care how bad three children
insulted her, what they said or how they said it. At the end of the
day, they’re just words muttered by a few kids. No matter how bad
it is, she’ll live,
which is more than can be said for some children that need that
money. Spending this amount on a grown woman who suffered through
some naughty words while others starve to death is a travesty.
That is, I felt
that way until I saw the video. A bit of personal backstory is needed
here: In my day job, I teach middle schools. And while I love my
students and my job, and never experienced anything as bad as Karen
did, I’ve been close enough to situations like this one to
understand how she must have felt. I’ve also spent a not
insignificant amount of time assisting MCO in any way that I can, so
I feel like I’m also familiar with the situation in Ethiopia
regarding children and education. And yet, knowing how bad things are
there and how much help is needed, I have never never been more angry
in the year that I’ve been assisting MCO as I was for the 3 and a
half minutes that I watched that video.
Now,
in his article, it seems to me, Bryan suggests that people lose their
focus from what’s important to distractions like this. I would
argue differently. I never lost my focus while getting angry at this
video, and it never escaped my notice this was not nearly as
important as any humanitarian crisis anywhere around the world and
not even close to being on the same level as one of those tragedies.
The logical portion of my brain told me all this, but I was so mad
I couldn’t even finish the video.
So
what’s going on here? Well, here’s my hypothesis. Because of my
job, I understand very well how frustrating it can be to be locked
into a situation like that with children. In fact, I imagine that
everyone at some point in their lives as been mocked by someone and
at the same time been unable to argue back for whatever reason.
However, because I’ve never been really, truly, painfully
poor in my entire life and always lived in relative comfort, I cannot
completely understand what these kids go through and therefore cannot
be sufficiently angry. To put it in another way, their lives are so
radically different from my own that when I try to imagine what it
must be like, it’s like trying to imagine an entirely new color.
Now, it may seem
like this article is heading for a downer ending, but that’s not
the case. Understanding is not a yes/no question. There are different
degrees of comprehension. If you read a book about Ethiopia, you
won’t understand completely what life is like there, but your
understanding will be improved. Or, if you visit Ethiopia, sponsor an
Ethiopian child, or read a blog about Ethiopia (thank you!) you can
inch ever closer to full understanding. From there, you can start to
feel sufficiently angry over the injustice in the world.
So, I think the most important thing for us is to first
understand. Understanding brings discontent, and from discontent,
action. We should seek knowledge to help ourselves and others
understand the situation, and our actions will soon follow.
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