A dead Syrian toddler broke our hearts in 2015. He sparked a wave of compassionate activism.

A crying toddler at the US-Mexico border crushed us in 2018 and sparked a new wave.

Crying children make us cry; they move us to help. And so they should.

But most crying children go unnoticed and never warrant a peep from media.   

We learned later that the border-child had not lost its mother. Mom was there. But this was a special crying child. She was a signal, a beacon.

This child must be listened to. She represented a more important fact, even though the picture did not show the trauma we assumed it did.

Marketing Activism?

Different toddlers cried at the same US border in 2015. But the Syrian toddler owned the spotlight then. So we didn’t hear about the border babies.

And we don’t hear about the 687,000 children crying in American foster homes in 2016 (~48,000 in Canada 2011).

Our hearts don’t break for the children torn from their parents’ arms outside jails every day.

The important thing, today, is that we care about the toddler at the border.

And we do. We grieve. We express shock and outrage, as we should. It is good that the baby at the border bothers us. It is bad that all the other babies do not.

Real life bores us. 

Media has no stamina for the mundane and depressing. Editors do not want to publish that patients still wait in hallways. They want fresh headlines.

They want to write about homeless kids addicted to meth in Northern communities with no running water. 

An old person, who never took meth, or lived on the street, and never did anything dangerous at all seems rather banal.

Shouldn’t Grandma Ellie lying on a hallway stretcher, with a urine soaked diaper stuck to her bed sores mean as much as the youth addicted to meth?

Compassion should move us to action for both. But it does not.

Tragedy at Home is Old News

I met with a healthcare reporter from a large, national newspaper last summer. I asked if she would write about the patients warehoused for months in our hospital auditorium. She said, “We’ve already run that kind of story. My editors need a new angle.” 

We ignore the tragic and mundane because it is mundane. We grow insensitive. Suffering goes unnoticed. Until the media points at a new thing. Something shiny and irresistible that makes us ignore everything else.

Hard cases make bad laws. Sad stories make bad policy. Politicizing public policy with partisan activism around hard cases does not create good legislation. Running after the next most popular heart-rending issue does not make us a better society. 

The 4300 patients treated in hallways at Brampton Civic last year – one hospital! – will never move us the way one crying child will.

Thousands of patients with no toilet, no privacy, lying in pain can’t come close. But one child, who hadn’t even been separated from its mother, demands notice.

Manipulation muddles brains. Media manipulates its audience to ends that benefit media. If it bleeds, it leads. If it only lies in a hallway on a squishy wet diaper, it’s barely news and not fit to print.

Making policy requires discipline. It’s like playing chess at a birthday party for a boys’ Pee Wee soccer team. You need focus. You must choose a move that creates the most impact. You must ignore shiny objects.

Guilty Activism?

Maybe we know, deep inside, that huge tragedies take place all the time, and we are powerless. Maybe all the pain we did not address makes us more activist about the pain that demands our attention right now. 

Does activism help? 

Micah White, founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement, wrote a book that says it does not. Even a world wide protest against the Iraq war didn’t stop the invasion. 

Compassionate people must pour passion into all the latest social travesties. We must show that we care.

Our Prime Mister took a hard line on #MeToo: guilty before proven innocent. Then his own groping incident surfaced. Did he protest too much? 

But activism feels good.  It feels much better than the mundane slogging that real change requires.

Activism around the latest issue puts us on the right side of an issue. It shows the world what we believe. It’s a secular altar call.

Come to the front.

Show the world what you stand for.

Let’s immanetize the eschaton! (i.e., Build utopia here, now. See Voegelin’s New Science of Politics, 1952)

Conversion can change lives, but not when it happens every two weeks.

Real change takes time, effort, perseverance, character, and hope.

Good people cannot ignore crying children. But I wish the same good people would pay attention to all the crying children that media does not care about.

Playing favourites with compassion changes little, but it sure makes us feel righteous.

Photo credit: cropped image of John Moore’s original.