Loving Paris more than the rest of the world

I understand why some people complain about the outpouring of support and solidarity with the victims of terrorist attacks in Paris in comparison to the trickle directed toward the victims in Beirut and the long list of people around the world who suffer from violence that they did nothing to deserve. The ubiquitous French flag filter on Facebook profile pictures can make it seem like some people’s lives matter and some don’t.

We’d live in a better world where people care most about the most serious problems, less about the less serious problems and so on down to the trivial—however we determine seriousness. But most people act on issues that touch their hearts and some places, like Paris, have made heart-touching a specialty. Many people around the world have had special moments in Paris; many more dream of having special moments there. Its long history as a beautiful, affluent and peaceful place (with its own upheavals now and again) have helped it worm its way into books, movies and songs which have added to and expanded  the city’s appeal. We think we know Paris even before we even set foot within its boundaries. Visitors often have their expected magical experience there, even if the city itself plays a supporting role to their imagination in providing it.

Places and cultures that have had rougher histories have not had the luxury of being able to brand so brilliantly, to extend their reach into the imaginations of citizens of dramatically different and far-flung cultures. Which isn’t fair. Those who have had a rougher history deserve more TLC a empathy, not less.

But people cannot turn off their emotions so easily. The fall of the World Trade Centre in New York overshadows the rest of the trauma of 9/11 in part because so many of us had been to or wanted to visit those buildings. When we hear “attacks in Paris,” most of us in the west can immediately conjure a visual image, even if it’s grossly inaccurate. It’s harder to do for places which need to be described to us in a sentence or paragraph or article before we can accurately place them on the map in our heads. Feelings hit faster and stronger than facts. Memories or fantasies of walks by the Seine overwhelm body count numbers.

Berating people doesn’t rewire this fundamental type of emotional connection. Often it makes the person more entrenched in their beliefs. Nobody wants to think that their “special person/place/thing” is an arbitrary fluke of history, something born of bias and hurtful to those who have not wormed their way into their attention with charm and good looks. We love who we love. We don't want to feel bad about our affections.

How do we make people care about people whose suffering they are not so familiar with? Those bonds need to transcend and probably predate the suffering itself. I visited Mumbai decades ago, loved it and was appalled when the city was attacked in 2008. Without thinking about it, my heart went out to those who were killed,  or merely terrified. I loved the city first, cried on its behalf it later.

Logic and argument rarely make a dent in people’s affections. Those who learn to appreciate the best of different cultures and different parts of the world are more likely to feel empathy with them when the worst happens. Not when they're distraught about some other place. 

Building community and excitement

The one thing I regret not including in this piece for Yonge Street Media--you can only fit so much in one story--is one of the triggers for Playing for Keeps and other programs designed to generate excitement about the Pan Am/Parapan Games. 

That is: Organizers, including some city councillors, attended the Pan Am Games in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2011 and saw how excited people were about the Games. The city was abuzz. And Canadians started to worry that Toronto would look blasé by comparison.

So, a lot of the windup to the Games was motivated by fear of looking dull and boring.

Not an unuseful fear.

Last problems standing

When I hear the "Oh no, the US is going to meddle in the Middle East again" reaction to the discussion about intervention in Syria, I think of something one of my professors said in a lecture during my first year of journalism school.

One of the reasons we're so obsessed with cancer and AIDS (this was 1989), he said, was that modern medicine had eradicated most of the other diseases that killed us. They were the last killers standing and so we ascribed them with special meaning and special status.

When you look at how many conflicts there were in, say, Latin America or Southeast Asia and the many US interventions, for better or worse, in those countries right up to the early 1990s, the metaphor seems to apply to geopolitics, too.

Not that we're at the The End of History. But it does feel like the clash-of-civilizations trope that feeds Middle Eastern fatalism is shortsighted. All we know for sure about Middle Eastern problems is that they have so far last a couple of decades more than serious conflicts in other regions. A couple of decades is not much in the span of human history, though it certainly is horrific when measured in a lifetime. The immediate cost of these problems is awful, but that does not mean they are different category of problem.