Why our brains can’t cope with tragedy overload

This week has been a horrific one for tragic events: children blown up by bombs in Gaza, almost 300 innocent passengers killed when their plane is shot down over Ukrainian airspace, more fleeing migrants drowning in their attempts to reach Europe and the relentless, ongoing conflicts in Syria, Libya and pretty much everywhere you look.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that at one point, I have to stop reading or listening to this kind of news. I say this shamefacedly, but it is the truth.

The magnitude of the sorrow and heartbreak becomes too much, and I feel helpless and powerless. Commiserating and murmuring ‘poor things’ is useless; it doesn’t change anything and for all the rhetoric by politicians, we know the the killing and fighting will go on. 

We shut down like this, I think, not because we are selfish or heartless but because of self-preservation. Our brains and emotions cannot cope with the full scale of the escalating death count, and whether one calls it an escape mechanism or denial, the fact remains that we just don’t want to hear any more.  

The crux of the matter is that many of these world events are so completely out of our control that if we dwell on them too much, we will become paralyzed with fear and paranoia. Random acts of violence, such as the downing of  Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, are the kind of tragedies that are particularly terrifying. 

I read about people who were meant to be on that flight but for whatever reason were not, and it makes me wonder what is it about a person’s destiny or fate which allows him/her to escape having their life cut abruptly short?

It always reminds me of those who narrowly missed being killed at the World Trade Centre on 9/11 because they were running late or those who took a different route and were not blown up in the heart of London on that July day in 2005. 

The families of the victims will never be the same, but I think that survivors too will forever be scarred by the questions of “what ifs” endlessly churning around in their brains. This type of man-made violence is especially cruel to contemplate because it is a deliberate act of terror that strikes us when we are going about our daily lives.

Nothing can ever be the same; it shakes us to the core as we wonder where terrorists will strike next while we obediently strip ourselves of shoes and belts and liquids every time we go through airport security. If we allow ourselves to think about it too much we would never board a plane again, right?

It has often occurred to me (in times when I cannot keep myself from dwelling), that this life we are living is all a fluke. We were born here and not in a war-torn country purely as a matter of luck. Our paths take us into danger, or lead us away from it, because that is the way our lives were meant to be.  We can easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time, like those who chose to spend their Christmas in Thailand when the fatal Tsunami struck in 2004. 

Or else Someone Up There decides that we should be spared heartache, like the parents whose children escaped unscathed on that day in 1996 in Dunblane, Scotland when a deranged shooter killed 16 children and one teacher. 

I remember I cried for days after that tragedy, looking at the innocent faces of those children, asking God why he allows such atrocities to happen, until finally I couldn’t cry any more and I had to turn off the news and stop buying the papers for a while.  

However, even in death it is all a fluke, for the numerous children who are dying all the time in the Middle East as casualties of war are not given the same tributes to their memory and extensive media coverage as when a child dies in the West. They are mere numbers in a growing tally in our daily headline, rather than faces with names.

“One out of five dead in Gaza are children” reads one headline and while we may mentally register this information, it is as if we have become numb and immune to what that really means. It means a whole generation is being wiped out.

But the futility of how little we can do with this knowledge just leaves us with a heavy heart; as long as men continue playing their territorial war games there really is no solution in sight.