(no subject)

[rivka]

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery or a borrowing of misery, as though we are not miserable enough of ourselves but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors. - John Donne, Meditation XVII

I have tried to say what needs saying half a dozen times, and haven't been able to continue. I don't want to link to the source material, partly out of respect for the person in whose journal it was posted, and partly out of a desire to protect other people from exposure to that kind of callous blindness.

But.

(1) Secondary PTSD is a well-recognized psychiatric phenomenon, and was so well before the onslaught of the Republican war machine.

(2) There is a substantial difference between empathy and credulity. Someone who is quicker to feel others' pain than you are is not necessarily being manipulated into it.

(3) If you conduct a large part of your social life over the Internet, how can you possibly not understand how other people could be strongly affected by an event that wasn't geographically close to them?

(4) This one is directed at a specific person who I don't even know, and who has only a vanishingly small chance of reading my journal. Nevertheless, if I don't say it, the unspoken words are going to be eating me up all night. So: if you haven't been there? Spare us your pseudo-sophisticated superior lefty cynical detachment and SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Comments

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Heh. Amen to /you/.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

*points up* What he said.

I didn't know this was about Lileks until I read the comment thread, and having read that I'm not very surprised. I stopped reading him quite a while back. It seemed to me that his empathy reached the limits of his house and stopped there; anything beyond he evaluated only on the grounds of however it would affect him and his. After a while I genuinely got the feeling that, as a foreigner, I wouldn't even be welcome for conversation with him---I don't know what precisely gave me that feeling, but something did and I quit. I have better things to raise my blood pressure with.

I might be wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

My original post had nothing whatsoever to do with James Lileks, whom I don't even read. This is topic drift.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I wasn't amenning on the Lileks bit. I was amenning to the general sentiment, and probably to the specific sentiment, too, since I suspect she was reading some of the same discussions on the topic that I was.