Ignorance

In a casual Sunday afternoon late lunch with my family, overlooking Toronto’s frozen horizon beyond the lake, I realized I don’t know anything about what is going on in the world. As my sixteen-year-old daughter was talking with my husband about the news, I was looking back and forth between them, clueless. I am not aware of the news happening in the world, including the shooting at Brown University and Sydney. What does that really mean for me?

I have a small business, connected to the world for sure, so I need to know what is going on, specifically in Canada and the United States, so I read Economics, New Yorker, and sometimes world politics from the Guardian. I need to admit, from the time I have scheduled myself to write every night, I am not reading news a lot, maybe once a month, even less. I feel ashamed not to have the channels to know the news, but…

What gets me hooked is what can I truly do for the shooting at Brown, or Sydney, or anywhere in the world? Yes, I agree. I need to know, but can I do anything about it? And being honest, if I can’t, I don’t want to be distracted. I know it feels stupid, and if it was ten years ago someone told me they don’t read the news, I would start preaching about how our world is getting separated and how we are becoming numb citizens of the world. Am I becoming one of them? The many who don’t want to read the news or watch the videos released from the official TikTok of the White House!

Okay, let’s go back to basics.

Who am I?

A mom, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a business owner, a fiction writer in practice. This is as much as I can be. There are not enough hours in the day to try to be other things.

So, let’s think — who am I not?

I am not a politician. I am not an activist, although the years of living under the Islamic regime in Iran, I was thinking I am. The truth is, I am not. Other than tattooing my arm I didn’t do anything for the woman freedom social revolution in Iran. I don’t have the courage and selflessness. Am I a blogger? An influencer? I don’t think so. I like to have a positive impact on people’s lives, but that’s not my destiny.

If you ask me if I have empathy for people? I will pause to answer but, I think I do. I have been crying over childlren or adult getting killed or hurt in the world conflicts. But hear me out, deep insight, if I can’t do something about it, I prefer it stays out of my life. There is that much I can take and maybe that’s the problem, we are all so busy with our own shit.

I can’t just see and go, I need to do something about the things I feel are wrong. The reason I built my own business after working twenty years in corporate or artistically driven companies. My mind goes to making systems to fix the problem, and when it gets to world politics, it’s confusing and complex, and I can’t make anything from it, so I feel helpless. My defence mechanism; ignorance.

When we get home from the late lunch, I started reading the news. The twenty-one-year-old Mia at Brown University, who is a survivor of a previous shooting in 2019 and survived this shooting too, said wisely:
“Everyone always tells themselves it’ll never be me.”

This is so true in our world. War just for others, horror and killing not for me, just for others, suicide never for my family, death okay. This one we can’t ignore. People die, right? But then when the horror, war shows up at our door, we are surprised, because as modern, numb citizens of the world, where following the news every day seems like torture, we don’t really know what’s going on.

So, let’s go back to basics.
Should we follow the news or not?