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The Tragically Short Lifespan of Outrage

“True… lengthy, but true.”

I received this comment on one of my blog posts this week.

The post was less than 700 words long.

That’s 5 Tweets.

The stranger’s sentiments worried me when I saw them for the first time, and yesterday as I stared at the churning flood of social media anguish and outrage in the aftermath of the Charleston church shooting, that worry soon turned to anticipatory grief for what I know is coming so very quickly: the death of that anguish and outrage.

In a day or two (or at most a week) we will all have moved on to the next trending hashtag, the latest sharable meme, the most current horrible event around which to craft clever, witty, cutting platitudes—and we’ll all fool ourselves into believing we actually give a damn as we do.

And maybe we really do.

Maybe we do give a damn about Charleston; about the innocent victims and their families, about divided communities and historic racism, about guns and terrorism and violence and all the nasty stuff something like this slaps us in the face with.

The problem is we aren’t able to give a damn for very long any more.

We have become corporately addicted to urgency, always looking for the next easy high that we seem to find only in tragedy, and like all addictions it’s an exercise in diminishing returns. We need more and it we need it quickly.

Always chasing the adrenaline rush of immediacy and newness, our hearts can’t linger long enough to go deeper than 140-character pinpricks fixes and momentary compassion. These terrible events are just emotional commodities that we use and discard at the end of the day.

We feel bad and we feel good about feeling bad.

Charleston deserves our prayers and our attention today, but it deserves a heck of a lot more. I’m just not sure we’re willing or able to give them much more than that. I hope that I’m wrong.

Today we’ll all procrastinate away the difficult, messy conversations about race and gun violence and mental illness and media manipulation in the name of reverence for the victims, but in reality that’s just a crafty ploy; a shrewd dodge to buy us all time until the next atrocity pops up on our timelines, and we can once again publicly weep and gnash our teeth and churn out timely soundbites that require only the crackling pop of shallow anger and starkly drawn black and white battle lines.

But these wounds are deep.

Their damage, invasive.

They demand more than our brevity.

They merit more than concise summations.

They deserve those hearts that do linger long enough to outlast the news cycle and stay past the point when the topic is sexy or the cause in vogue.

These horrific injuries to our shared humanity cannot be treated with a quick alcohol swab to the skin because the that won’t stop the bleeding.

That necessary repair can only come from the kind of sustained attention and difficult questions and complex discussion that frankly we just may not have in us as a people anymore.

I’m afraid that long before all of the victims in Charleston will even be buried, our awareness of them will be; pushed to the bottom of our news feeds and timelines they will be replaced by the next screaming nightmare that we will once again respond to with great ferocity and compassion.

Until the next day comes.

 

Note: I apologize greatly for the length of this post.

Please feel free to substitute: #PrayingForCharleston

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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