In the past couple of months, there have been multiple terrorist attacks all over the world, and one that we all can easily recall into our minds are the Manchester Bombings that happened during an Ariana Grande concert on May 22nd. This tragic event flooded our Twitter and Instagrams with the bunny ear cross and support for the victims of the attacks, similar to when groups of people put the Paris filter on their picture after the Paris attacks.
Recently Kabul was also attacked, but the same concern and push to save and help was missing from my timelines. The lack of attention to these events demonstrates the bias of the "West" to take into concern those that are not theirs. No one would ever say that some lives are worth more than others, but one attack resulted in a concert and vigils, another resulted in reading statistics online.
I can name at least three of Manchester's victims, from memory, but I was not even given the names of the victims in Kabul.
This demonstrates how we as the people are able to ignore terrorism if it does not happen in a first world country. Kabul isn't a country where bombs drop all the time, the people of the country weren't expecting to die that day, exactly like the people attending the Ariana concert on May 22nd. We are so emotionally detached from the terror attacks that happen in the Middle East, because we internalized that the people of these countries are used to it, or we think it's not our issue, it's their issue, or we don't think it's an issue at all, because we're not involved.They're the other. They're used to it. They're not us. They don't matter. Imagine one child's life not being worth the same as another.
I'm not saying that Manchester doesn't deserve attention. Of course, they do, this was a truly devastating thing for so many people. But I wish at least we would be the same under tragedy. I wish the media could stop dehumanizing a whole group of people. I wish that celebrities would stop picking and choosing certain tragedies to tweet about. I wish we could at least be united in these trying times.
