What does a normal person do with the really bad news that we hear and read in the newspaper or on the evening news?
We are constantly bombarded with news of death from war in Afghanistan and Syria, immigrants young and old drowning trying to reach safety, young students dying from school shootings, people dying from natural disasters and fires. How does an individual deal with all of this and still remain sane?
Dr. Robert J. Lifton dealt with this issue for years and he has come to understand how the human mind copes with these terrible atrocities. He calls it psychic numbing. When we hear about terrible events and see the suffering, it causes our mind to eventually block the ability to feel it any longer. In other words, the human spirit can only take so much bad news before it numbs itself.
When Dr. Lifton was interviewing Japanese survivors who had been in Hiroshima when the bomb fell, he said they would describe the experience they had. ‘I saw this array of dead and dying people around me. But suddenly I simply ceased to feel anything.’ It was as though the mind shuts itself off.
We do the same with the news we hear on a daily basis. Too often those of us who are trying to better the world in so many different ways are caught up in being critically aware of the atrocities that are being committed and those who suffer the most from these atrocities. I am sure many of us cease to feel the full impact of the suffering in order to be able to cope.
As I sit and write this, the first news is coming in from New Zealand about the shooting in the mosques. I turned on the TV and was able to see the families of those who had died trying to cope with the loss. I can feel their pain and would reach out to them if I could. It is just such atrocities that we have come to deal with too often. This is why we work to make a better world.