235 killed in Egypt mosque attack

Militants Kill 235 in Attack on Sufi Mosque in Egypt

 

I am tired of the world.

 

This has become a recurring theme in my posts to the point where I'm kinda embarrassed to keep repeating it each time.

But, what the hell, once again, I can't believe the level of contrasting reaction when these attacks occur in the US or Western Europe compared to rest of the world. Put this same attack anywhere in the Western world and it's the only thing we're talking about tonight, but move it just a bit south of Europe until it reaches Egypt, and now it's just passing news, no need for any sort of extended CNN coverage, and certainly no more than a forgettably brief smattering of SJ posts.

 

I once went to a meditation lecture at the Smithsonian and the speaker was Jack Kornfield (no relation to freq).

During the Q&A session, a lady stood up and asked what should she do - she was so frustrated with the world (this was around the Fall of 2003 after Iraq had been invaded). She was overwhelmed with all the bad news and felt unable to do anything about it.

Kornfield said that you have to have reasonable expectations about how you can effect change. Back in the day, say 200 years ago, most news you got was local news, received by newspaper, mail or word of mouth. And if a neighbor was in need, you could help them rebuild a house or barn after a fire or take care of them if they were ill. So you could actually do something and feel helpful and useful.

In this day and age, it's easy to feel hopeless about a lot of global news. And being able to actually feel like you are making much of a difference on that scale is really tough to do.

(And, debating on message boards doesn't really accomplish a damn thing in my opinion. If we actually ever solve anything here, someone please visit and knock me over with a feather.)

 

Sometimes we solve problems with sports Halls of Fame. To be less snarky on a thread about an atrocity, local action is indeed a positive. But in a world of a zillion online communities, expressing yourself in one of them is not nothing. Maybe not much more, but it is something. Look at how this board reacts when something bad happens to one of us in real life.

 

True, and Della's posts on that subject are very impressive.

 

I'm fine most days. I do my best to live my life in a way that I feel is kind and ethical. And I'll be fine tomorrow. But sometimes it's just all too much, ya know?

 

Slaughtering innocent unarmed civilians is horrific. Never makes sense.

And Stoney makes a great point. This was a bit less than one tenth of a 9/11, but it won't be covered by American media like that. And it should be.

 

But ... but POTUS is pouting about not being Time's "Person of the Year."

 

Just my two cents, but I think a lot of the lack of coverage stems from looking at the past history of the region. There's been violence in that region for centuries between various warring factions and it's not ending any time soon.

So when we look at an attack like this, we just shrug our shoulders and figure that it's just another act of violence in an historically-violent region.

 

No Egyptian flag filters showing up on my Facebook feed yet. Maybe I’ll give it another day.

 

It's a fair point in that something like this should be covered more by the American media. But it's not surprising or illogical that it isn't. Distance naturally and nearly always decreases interest and impact. There's nothing untoward in that. It's disappointing and unfortunate, but not necessarily wrong.

What's more important, and what I think I'd find more interesting is, if, how and how much it was covered by the Egyptian media.