A tragic weekend for Europe
I woke up Saturday morning to read on Twitter the breaking news. Living in Barcelona you can’t but feel bad and a little bit scared that more than a hundred people were killed in a terrorist attack in France, our neighbor country.
As usual the headlines on news websites were meant to scare the shit out of all of us. When you get to certain age you can recognize the bullshit the media tries to attract you with. That’s why you check multiple sources, specially social media.
A world response on Facebook
It’s sad. Facebook released a feature to overlay your profile avatar with the France flag. So because I guess it’s trendy, everybody did it. I don’t understand why.
So the pretext is that you want to show your support with the French people, you show your empathy for this tragic events. I saw people from everywhere using the new profile images, even in South Korea.
Right, I give my support too. Don’t get me wrong. People give more importance to issues as the get closer to their homes. Paris, relatively speaking, is close to Barcelona. It could’ve happen here.
What’s the problem then?
The problem is with people only “showing their support” when it happens in Paris but not so much when thousands are killed in Syria or Lebanon.
I’m no saying how you should feel, you feel more empathy for Europe than a far away country you’ve barely heard about, I get that.
What I’m asking about you is to be considerate with them too. Show your support to both, we’re all humans, we all suffer this tragedies the same way. Yes, ok, change your Facebook avatar but also share news and pictures of those fighting for survival there. Not just in Paris.
I’ve given two examples but there are problems everywhere (South America, Africa…).
It’s not all your fault
The media is at fault here. They exploit this events more than they cover regular killings in other countries. They just don’t matter as much. People just don’t care as much (they might argue).
Perhaps if the media covered more those events too, people would be more aware. Don’t you think?
Or would the people still care less if they did in fact cover them more?
Ricard