Mourn for Belgium, but don’t forget the suffering elsewhere

Flags across Alaska were ordered to half-staff this week as a way to memorialize the victims in a terrorist bombing that left more than 30 dead in the Belgian city of Brussels. Gov. Bill Walker made the announcement on Wednesday after receiving the order from President Barack Obama.

In his announcement about the flags, Gov. Walker said the thoughts of Alaskans were with the innocent victims of the attack.

“There are no words to express how devastating the events in Brussels are today,” the governor said.

Walker wasn’t the only one to express sympathy with the victims, with GCI offering free text messages to Belgium to make it easier for people to get in touch with friends and loved ones.

These gestures were made with the intent of expressing sorrow and solidarity with those affected, and we have no doubt about their sincerity. However, it’s worth noting that several other major global terror attacks occurred in recent days that seemed to pass almost unnoticed by politicians, business leaders and, yes, the media.

On March 13, 37 people were killed and more than 100 injured in Ankara, Turkey, by a suicide bomber linked to Kurdish separatists. On March 16, two female Boko Haram suicide bombers killed 24 worshipers at a mosque in Maiduguri, Nigeria. That same day, a bus bombing linked to the Taliban in Peshawar, Pakistan, killed at least 15 people.

These incidents passed by almost unnoticed here in the United States. There were no Facebook profile filters, no press releases from local business, no candlelight vigils. The silence was so deafening, a person in state government we spoke with this week said they hadn’t even heard of the attacks. The budget process, they said, tends to drown out a lot of news in Juneau.

Another person we spoke with suggested the media is to blame for not publicizing attacks in non-Western countries. That’s partially true, but also misleading. Yes, we in the media are guilty of selectively covering certain events, but that’s only because of the numbers-driven world we occupy. Media outlets are obsessed with web hits these days, and people don’t click on stories about murdered Pakistanis. After all, goes the logic, doesn’t that happen all the time over there?

Yes, yes it does. And therein lies the problem.

Every time we ignore the suffering of those who “aren’t like us,” every time we dismiss the pain of those living in countries we deem to be less important than a place like Belgium or France or California, every time we pretend that some deaths matter more than others, we’re continuing to feed into the most destructive force we have in our world: division. By failing to acknowledge that all innocent lives are equally valuable, we fuel the idea that some groups of people are somehow less human than others.

This division is occurring at almost every level of our society and in many different ways. Take our political system, for example. Terms like “Republican wingnut” or “bleeding heart liberal” are thrown around so much that they’re in the popular vernacular. But by dividing ourselves along these lines, by applying labels to everyone, we create an “us vs. them” mentality: rich vs. poor, black vs. white, Christian vs. Muslim, you against me.

It’s this mentality that allows us to feel sympathy for a dead Parisian but to shrug off the death of a murdered Nigerian. And it’s this mentality that is at the heart of what’s tearing our world apart.

We all bleed. We all hurt. We all suffer. There is no difference between the senseless deaths of scores of people, no matter where they happen to live. For us to continue to act as if some tragedies are more horrific than others is an unforgiveable mistake.

When we fail to see other people as human, those people will return the favor. And as long as this cycle of dehumanization continues, the dark forces pulling our world apart will only gain more power to destroy.

We do not begrudge those who cry today for Belgium; however, let’s not forget those whose cries remain unheard.