On this past Friday April 19th, I was talking on the phone with a colleague as I sat in my bedroom under orders to stay in my house with the doors locked. By the time this phone call happened, the initial fear and panic of waking up to learn that one of the Boston Marathon bombers was holed up somewhere just a couple miles from my home had started to subside.
After we talked through the pressing work items — a welcome distraction from the chaos down the street — the conversation shifted to what was happening at that moment. As it went on, I told her that, behind my immediate primal fears of harm, I was struggling with how to feel about this whole thing. Working for an organization that deals in the global health world (or, for that matter, trying to follow news and events beyond my immediate experience) I hear of tragedy every day. I know that my own fears are just a glimpse into the everyday struggles of so many others and I know that the lingering anxiety does not mean I deserve the same empathy as those who live in places filled with brutally constant distress. What right did I have to be worried about someone with guns and bombs running around in my backyard when I had the extreme privilege of knowing there were thousands of law enforcement officers that I could implicitly trust to keep me safe from his propensity for causing harm?
Living through the Boston Marathon bombings and the subsequent manhunt does not negate the great amount of privilege that I have as an American, just as it does not equip me to truly understand the difficulties many face in their daily lives. I cannot understand what it is like to live in Damascus in 2013, knowing that every time I step foot out of my house I’m stepping into a war zone. I will never know what it is like to be a girl facing violence in my family home. And I won’t likely experience true hunger. We cannot truly understand such experiences without having lived through them. This is the point. We cannot understand an experience we have not had.
But even this perspective does not help me sort out the immediate feelings that surround such an event. Needless to say, my colleague and I didn’t resolve the issue. I am still not sure how to approach my own feelings about what happened in my community. My anxiety was and continues to be very real. I am still asking myself, what am I to take from this experience? Am I to just experience this as an isolated moment?
I know trying to isolate this experience is not the most productive thing to do, not just for me, but for our community and nation as a whole. Maybe the best thing is to log our fear in our minds. Rather than understand, we can use that the flash of fear every time a heart skips a beat at the sound of a siren in the distance. We can take individual experiences and channel them into a creative means to keep moving forward. We won’t fix the world overnight. But, at the very least, we can try to turn all these experiences into a little reminders of why we need to continue pushing this mountain of inequity, inch by inch, towards our vision of what the world can be.
