Within moments of receiving the first news alerts of last week’s Paris attacks, I knew, via Facebook’s handy safety check feature, that an acquaintance who lives there is safe. Good news. But honestly I had totally forgotten until that moment that I even knew this person.
Within seconds of the first incomplete news reports being posted online, my social media feed was filled with French flags, solidarity right there in red, white and blue. How easy it is in the online age to feel we are making a meaningful contribution with a few clicks of the mouse. Of course in actuality we are doing nothing of the sort.
My actions were equally ineffective. I opted for the opposite approach, standing with the faction for whom horrific violence in relatively safe places in the world serves as a poignant reminder of all the ongoing war, conflict and human suffering we collectively tune out. I’m with the group that heard about Paris and immediately invoked Iraq, Lebanon and Kenya. Rather than the French flag, I shared that viral poem by Instagram user Karuna E Parikh, the one beseeching people to pray not just for Paris but also for an entire world awash in violence.
Thus began the sanctimonious back-and-forth between armchair ideologues — and I am prominent among them — that occupied my weekend.
In the past few days I have debated, with no small amount of energy or passion, the meaning of the word “prayer,” I have weighed in on our collective shock over Paris at the expense of Beirut or Baghdad and I have posted in-depth articles on the psychology of ISIS fighters in a bid to prove to the nameless, faceless Internet masses that poverty, humiliation and disenfranchisement have as much a role to play in the radicalization of angry young men as does religious dogma.
And now I am embarrassed. Not for my point of view but for my entire generation. Sometimes we truly live up to the stereotype of entitled narcissists.
In the first few days after Paris, not one person in the insular echochamber of my social media feed, myself again included, posted much about helping the Syrian refugees headed our way, to our city. We were too busy arguing over the correct way to express whatever it was we were feeling or thinking or concluding online. Finally, we started to connect the dots that it is up to us to donate food, or time, or money for the human beings who are the most direct victims of this reign of terror, the people who will soon be a part of our community. Might I suggest that, rather than pick each other apart, we instead channel our outrage, fear and grief into taking tangible action to remedy, in some small way, the havoc these attacks have wrought on our collective human psyche?
When the 300 refugees who are expected to settle in Vancouver arrive in just a couple of weeks, they will need real help from real people. They will need food, shelter, clothing and counselling. They will need help navigating our transit system, our culture, learning English, making friends and finding housing in one of the tightest rental markets in the country. They will need help adjusting to the weather, applying for jobs, filling out forms and overcoming a kind of trauma most of us, mercifully, will never be able to fathom. They will need someone to give them directions when they are lost, to take them out for coffee, to let them know that they are welcome here and to listen to what they have to say.
They will not need our opinions on world events bolstered by cherry-picked news sources collected in our navel-gazing attempts to make sense of a kind of violence that for most of us remains entirely abstract.
The last few days have demonstrated to me that we clearly have more time and energy to devote to this issue than we think. No amount of online proselytizing or prayer or debate or profile pictures bearing the colours of whatever flag captures our sympathies is going to win the global war on terror.
It’s time to stop fixating on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and visit a much more valuable website: the Immigrant Services Society of British Columbia (issbc.org). It’s time to sign up to volunteer, to donate, or come up with some other way to really help real people in the real world. Refugees need our help for their survival. We need to give them that help for the good of our souls.
@jm_barrett
