A grocery list of suffering, but who has it the worst?
All suffering is relative, we know that. So who is suffering more right now? Me, I think. And you, dear reader. I’m wrong but let me explain.
The scenes at Kabul’s international airport grind at the human heart but again all suffering is relative there, too.
Do Afghan women have the most to fear? Yes, that’s always true in religionist nations. Or is it the Afghans who worked for the U.S and its allies in the 20 years since the Americans invaded?
American social media whip up resentment, the role they were created to play. Their profit lies in invidious comparisons. Is it true that U.S. military dogs were evacuated along with their trainers? If so, would that be unfair to abandoned Afghan families? But those soldiers would flatly refuse to leave their dogs behind.
And if the dogs were left in Kabul, wouldn’t another social media tribe be just as irate? (Read your local Facebook page to see incoherent dog love as a symptom of our times.)
So Afghans flew out of Kabul in huge airplanes without proper safety precautions, the military packing in hundreds of unsecured civilians — I doubt they demanded seats and drinks service — because it was maybe better to get the hell out.
How different from Americans on domestic flights, who demand that the passenger ahead not recline her seat and who scream and snivel and punch a flight attendant in the face for asking that COVID masks be worn.
Again, all suffering is relative. When Virginia Woolf drowned herself in 1941, her body wasn’t found for weeks. You can imagine what her husband saw when he identified the body. Yet he wrote in his diary, “It is a strange fact that a terrible pain in the heart can be interrupted by a little pain in the fourth toe of the right foot.”
If compassion is a rubber band, it generally begins at one’s fourth toe and expands to Kabul airport. This explains the debate over the morality of booster shots for Canadians in a largely unvaccinated world.
Right now, COVID-19 ravages the unvaccinated of the poorly educated, religionist southern U.S. states. Remember Trump saying he loved the poorly educated?
Screaming Toronto similars are terrorizing Jen Agg’s downtown restaurants Southern-style after she spoke out in favour of vaccination identification. Americans die, Canadians are excoriated for not wanting to die.
Floods killed dozens in Tennessee because paved suburbs in wetlands can’t outmatch 432 mm of rain. Tennesseans might be mystified by their god’s punishment but it was lurking. Floods overtook large areas of Germany, an allegedly competent nation.
Stories like this are why I consider climate change in everything I buy and do. I want to mitigate acts that cause fire, flood, heat, deforestation and drought. I decided to buy a smaller bathtub to replace the current bathtub so huge it makes me feel guilty when I swim in it. I sit up straight lest I drown.
Imagine the wasted water, I think. My Scottish relatives used to bathe in the same water — we’re all family here — so I could drink some, I think doubtfully. What does argan oil bubble bath taste like?
As it turns out, blocked supply chains mean there are no baths to buy. If I serially select 20 short tubs, each is out of stock. Fine, I’ll spend reno money on an energy-efficient fridge.
There are no refrigerators, only dreams. Maybe you know someone who knows someone but I don’t. Energy-efficient renovators don’t call you back; there’s nothing to install.
I am suffering the agony of postponement. It is minuscule. It is to laugh. I, a liberal, pound myself with recriminations. An Afghan refugee would love any bath, any fridge. And yet I feel like Job because the one ameliorating thing I could do cannot be done.
Abused women in Pakistani villages would quarrel with that. So would the Rohingya in refugee camps, Thai shrimp farm slaves, Texas women seeking abortions, Indigenous women murdered in Alberta, divided Guatemalan families at the U.S. border, island nations as sea levels rise.
All suffering is relative. Of course yours and mine are worst. Maybe everyone in the world feels this way right now. We can’t all be wrong.
Maybe everyone in the world feels this way right now. We can’t all be wrong