Headlines and Sixty Second Sound Bites

New York Times: “Dog feeding stations in bombed out cities in Ukraine.”

New York Times: “We buried him and kept on walking.”

Evening Network   News: (after the Uvalde massacre) “When the families finish grieving…”

We live in a world of sixty second sound bites and headlines followed by three hundred word articles. We live in a theater of the short attention span.

What is left out of these headlines and sound bites is far more important.

It’s hard to fathom leaving behind a beloved pet knowing you are condemning them to almost certain death. It’s harder to imagine burying your child, who died of starvation, beside the road and continue walking to escape the famine in Somalia. It’s impossible to fathom an end-date to grief, as if it can be scheduled a week from next Tuesday.

To make matters worse, the next day these headlines are gone. The headlines have changed and the sixty second sound bites are different. We are confronted with the Senate hearings on the insurrection. We are on to the twenty massacres that have happened since Uvalde. Just in case you are wondering, a mass shooting is any gun event that involves four or more deaths/injuries not including the gunman.

It is tempting to just tune out the barrage of pain that is the daily fare of news. There is, at least for me, a fear of being swallowed alive. There is also the tendency to think it will never happen “here” wherever “here” happens to be for you. I can’t begin to imagine Russian warships coming into Narragansett Bay under the Newport Bridge. I can’t fathom that any of the hundreds of schools in my state are just as vulnerable as the schools where massacres have occurred. And, let’s be honest, there is a part of us that is grateful not to be in their shoes.

It’s a challenge to stay engaged in the world and hold on to our sanity. The key is holding on to both. We can’t hold on to one at the expense of the other. We have to keep our equilibrium and stay connected to what is happening in the world. Otherwise, we become hollow shells of human beings. In truth, we are always moving back and forth between the shores of the deep end of the world’s pain and the more immediate gifts and graces of our own lives.

The great poet Kahlil Gibran, influenced by both Christianity and the Sufi tradition of Islam, wrote about joy and sorrow as essentially two sides of the same coin. In his seminal work, The Prophet he writes,

            “Joy is your sorrow unmasked. The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain…. When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart and you shall see that in truth, you are weeping for that which has been your delight…. Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. Only when you are empty are you at a standstill and balanced.”

Holding sorrow and joy in mutually informative tension, as uncomfortable as it is, allows us to build emotional capacity for compassion without giving into despair. To live in this world is to experience constant emotional whiplash. It’s what it means to be a citizen of the world.

We cannot insulate ourselves from the world’s pain. The starvation and displacement of millions of people SHOULD break our hearts. “We buried him and kept on walking.” Neither should we insulate ourselves from the things that bring us joy, or feel guilty for feeling joy while so much of the world is a hot mess.

Looking beyond the sound bites and headlines, imagining that we are in their shoes and feeling something of the pain of others is what can spur us to action. Moving back and forth between the shores of joy and sorrow, seeing them as two sides of the same coin, helps us be engaged citizens of a troubled, beautiful, broken and  miraculous world.