What Does Suffering Require From Us?

Are we permitted to look away?

Dear Sighers,

I’m currently on vacation, so I’m rerunning pieces from the early days of this newsletter. The one below, which first ran in January 2024, seems particularly apt at this particular moment. Fascism is ascendant, children in Gaza are starving to death, and I’m reading something escapist on a beach. How am I supposed to square these things?

Before I leave you, I wanted to remind you that the ebook of Accountable, my nonfiction narrative about a racist social media account at a public high school, is currently on-sale for just $2.99. If you’re looking for a light beach read, this may not be the one, but if you’re looking for something to keep you turning pages, click here to order.

Happy August!

Dashka

Image © 2024 by Stephanie Damplo Luke

Recently I’ve been finding myself having the same conversation over and over. Sometimes it’s about Gaza and sometimes it’s about Ukraine and sometimes it’s about climate change and sometimes it’s about school shootings or human trafficking or any other of the world’s vast store of horrors. The conversation is about whether we are allowed to look away, to ignore the bad thing, or whether we are obligated to engage with it, understand it, recognize it, take it in.

I’m what is sometimes called a News Junkie, although the term doesn’t exactly describe my relationship to the news. I’m not an obsessive headline reader or watcher of cable news, but I do subscribe to four daily newspapers, several weekly and monthly news magazines, and a ridiculous number of newsletters and podcasts. I like to know what’s going on in the world, both locally and internationally, and I can get caught up both in the unfolding of a story in real time and in the deep analytical reporting that places that story in a broader context.

But lately, I’ve found my relationship to the news changing in ways that I’m not sure how to evaluate. It began in early December, when I went on a two-week writing retreat. During that time, I made a conscious decision to disconnect from both the news and from social media so that I could connect more deeply to my own work. After that, it was the holidays, and so I extended my news and social media fast a little longer in order to be more relaxed and present with my family. Then I went to Minnesota to teach for two weeks, working such long days that I’ve had little time for either the news or social media.

All of which means that I’m now in my sixth week of disconnecting from the news. I have tuned out natural disasters, school shootings, election maneuvers, two brutal wars, and much more.

And I’ll be honest: it’s been fantastic. Both my mood and my sleep are greatly improved. I feel less despairing, less worried, less angry. So why do I feel so guilty about it?

I’ve devoted much of my life to the job of alerting people to injustice and suffering in the belief that calling attention to a problem will help fix it. “You can’t fix what you don’t understand,” I often tell young people, and I believe this with every fiber of my being. James Baldwin said it better, of course. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” he wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Even when something can’t be fixed, or can’t be fixed immediately, there is a power in witnessing. It’s an act of profound generosity and humanity to pay attention to the suffering of others, particularly those whose suffering has been overlooked. Just paying attention can be an act of solidarity. In The 57 Bus, the Ladies who attend every one of Richard’s hearings represent that power of witness. Sometimes all you can do to help someone who is suffering is let them know that they’re not alone.

By this measure, I feel obligated to read about the deaths of children in Gaza and the rape of women in Israel, because their suffering demands recognition. I feel obligated not to avert my eyes from the latest mass shooting or famine or earthquake or massacre because no tragedy is run-of-the-mill to the people experiencing it. I feel required to know about the suffering of people in faraway places because failing to do so is to ignore all the ways in which our fates are intertwined, not only because we are inhabitants of the same imperiled planet, but also because so many of the comforts and conveniences of my world are predicated on the discomforts and difficulties in theirs. To live in abundance, peace, and safety while ignoring those who are living in poverty, war, and terror assumes that the present arrangement is morally acceptable, which it clearly isn’t.

In Chekhov’s short story, Gooseberries, the character of Ivan Ivanych derails a pleasant evening by giving an impassioned rant about his wealthy brother Nikolai, whose contentment in the face of suffering he finds morally repugnant. Here’s Ivanych:

Apparently, a happy man feels so only because the unhappy bear their burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Every happy man should have someone with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others.

Ivanych annoys his friends by being a buzzkill, but his rant does little to change the actual circumstances of anyone in the story. And in fact, the character of Ivanych takes great joy in the small pleasures of life, pleasures that are in no small measure a product of his social class. I suspect that if someone with a little hammer actually arrived at his door to interrupt those pleasures, he would soon send them packing.

These days, however, most of us carry Ivanych’s man with a hammer around in our pockets, where he constantly knocks on the doors of our brains with updates, alerts, notifications, and breaking news. That tsunami of suffering can easily drown our own small joys. And to what end? Is the world improved by adding my suffering to the pile? What has all this hammering achieved?

I hope you weren’t expecting that I had answers to these questions. I do not. I do know that excessive news consumption is bad for mental health and that pessimism, anxiety and depression don’t lead to engagement or activism. In fact, as a recent New York Times piece about so called “compassion fatigue” explains, “what drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it.” Tuning out the news is in part a reaction to the feeling that there’s nothing to be done to make things better.

I won’t be able to stay disconnected from the news for much longer. Soon I’ll be done with teaching for the semester and my desire to stay informed will reassert itself. Still, I’m giving myself permission to keep the man with the hammer from banging on my door quite so persistently. I probably will continue to avoid social media and to keep the alerts and notifications silenced. The world needs joy and connection, and it seems wasteful to squander these things when they come my way.

Recently, I encountered a poem by the late Jack Gilbert that I had filed away in the Notes app on my phone. It’s called A Brief for the Defense and it’s a counter-argument to the one posed by Ivan Ivanych. Gilbert writes:

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

What’s your relationship to the Man with the Hammer? Let me know in the comments.

With a sigh,

Dashka