Take a second the next time you watch the news and recognize your own blank stare as you learn about how a woman was stuffed into a bag early last week. News stories like these are strung together in 30-minute periods and flash across the screen with very little fanfare. How often do you find meaning in these daily stories of death?
I almost felt cold when I heard that a young child was kidnapped from her home. I looked at the television like I was looking at a brick wall, and then mindlessly switched to King of Queens and proceeded to laugh at the simplest jokes. Is it possible that at age 22 I am already thoroughly jaded by constantly hearing about other people's misfortunes?
Monday night, Faheem Thomas-Childs died in North Philadelphia. Only 10 years old, he was ironically called "the peacemaker" by his teachers, but two weeks ago, the native son was shot in the face on the playground of his school after being caught in the crossfire of a spontaneous, drug-related shoot-out. This story stunned the North Philadelphia area, yet it is still difficult to grasp any sentiment of empathy from the numerous, almost emotionless news stories about this boy's death -- stories that, in compliance with time constraints, are strategically squeezed between the weather, sports or a story of land disputes in Moorestown.
While we were in class, at work or pregaming, or while I was whining about my overwhelmingly detrimental senioritis, Faheem's mother found out that the neighborhood vigils and campaign to locate his shooters did not help revive him from his coma.
What is the point of mentioning the individual cases? While Faheem's life slowly disintegrated, this story modeled the senseless killings that happen every day, eventually blending into a stream of meaningless and disconnected words.
We are desensitized. The story of Faheem feels like just that: a story. The articles that detail his coma and subsequent death speak about some other person, in some other place, at some other time. We feel as close to Faheem's story as we do to Janet Jackson. Though Faheem was shot and killed in our city, in our community -- two bus transfers from the east entrance to the Quad, or just blocks from where I eat with friends on Sundays -- it doesn't feel that close. Somehow I could debate endlessly about the trials of Michael Jackson, with supporting evidence and historic claims, as if the molestation cases were currently happening in our own backyard.
Perhaps this case represents the ultimate exhibition of our desensitization. The statistics desensitize us, the news desensitizes us, the intangibility of others' realities desensitizes us, and this story carries the weight of all three. In a school where I teach, one of my students wanted to find out how many children were killed every minute in Philadelphia. The National Institute on Drug Abuse performed research on 190 North Philadelphia 7-year-olds in an attempt to gain perspective on children with similar life circumstances as Faheem. The results showed that 75 percent of the children had heard gunshots, and more than 60 percent said they were worried they might die or get killed.
But perhaps our desensitization simply means that we have lost the big picture. The individual incidents, small stories of violent deaths and life-altering experiences highlight something larger. We are desensitized because we build a disconnect between the incidents of a few -- Faheem's mother or the 190 7-year-olds in the study -- and the overarching reason behind the highlighted incidents.
Each highlighted incident simply brings to the forefront, if only for a minute, the structural inequalities that support drug wars like the one that killed Faheem. It is these inequalities that create neighborhoods where there is gang violence and where children as young as seven pray every night not to meet Faheem's fate. We should feel something because it says something about our society when disparities are so great that we feel closer to Hollywood than we do to North Philadelphia.
Our desensitization is more powerful than we think because it blinds us to these inequalities. Our blank faces and emotionless reactions keep us numb to the experiences that happen down the block, and we forget that what happens in our community affects us.
Perhaps Faheem's fate is a call to think deeper. It's one story hidden among many, but it happened close to home. There is always one story that slaps us in the face and helps us to recognize reality. Though this incident is someone else's reality, it has to be ours as well. And we cannot let our desensitization blind us to the big picture.
Darcy Richie is a senior urban studies major from Birmingham, Mich. Strange Fruit appears on Wednesdays.
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