Why I still haven't seen Blood Diamond

My friend Juan's brother was killed in front of his very eyes in a raid by his own country's government. My friend Julia was beaten and held against her will in an American household where she nannied the kids. These two people have each looked me in the eye and told me their painful stories, and both times I looked away. I focused on keeping my eyes dry and thought about what I could say afterwards to lighten the mood.

It's shameful. Why do I react like that? Why didn't I look back at them and try to share in their suffering? Isn't that what my faith tells to do?

"Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn." Romans 12:15

My discomfort is what happens when another story crashes in on my stable, comfortable world. It's a negative reaction to having to change my reality to include this awful truth. Maybe I'm scared of getting stuck in the sadness, that it'll stick to me like tree sap and taint all the good stuff in my life. Either way, my fear of that feeling usually pushes me to quickly distract myself with something fluffy or, even worse, to counsel myself that it all happened so far away from me and even that maybe, just maybe, those people deserved it.

It's the reason I avoid watching the movie Blood Diamond, what makes me skip over the newest reports on the horrors in Syria in favor of a EW's preview of summer movies.

In the book The Bean Trees, the main character Taylor, a small-town girl from Kentucky, meets a couple who escaped from 1980s war-torn Guatemala. They tell her how their friends were tortured and killed for being in a teachers union, and how they themselves lost their daughter when they refused to give her kidnappers information to help hunt down other targeted teachers. Taylor, like me, can't accept this reality.

"'I can't even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that.

'You live in that world,' Estevan said quietly, and I knew this, but I didn't want to."

There's a lot that I wish I didn't know, and too much that I try to forget. Our world contains the beautiful, but also the horrible, and I really can't see clearly or live with integrity if I don't acknowledge both. The thing is, I think we need to take that moment, soak in the details of some other flesh-and-blood peoples' suffering, and feel that wrench of our hearts. Cry, even. I say let empathy have its moment.

The term "bleeding heart" is used to mock people who outwardly show concern or shame in the face of injustices. People who talk passionately about oppression and injustices are "downers." I'm not saying we should live our lives in lamentation of Biblical proportions, but I think we do need to yank our heads out of the sand and look our neighbors in the eye.

It's not just the tree-huggers or the bleeding heart activists who care about things. No one is exempt. The difference is that many of us just swallow the lump in our throat, push away that empathy, before it can get us down.

So, yes, often I'm still too much of a wuss to mourn with those who mourn, but I'm working on it. When the constant news noise leaves me numb, I'll find a book on a serious topic, a well-researched novel or a memoir. With these stories one resonates, empathizes with real-life global neighbors in a much deeper way. This brings me back to my humanity, to deep empathy for my neighbors, wherever they may be. And sometime soon, I'll borrow someone's Blood Diamond DVD and hunker down with some tissues and a prayer.