Fashion illustration Stories

The right to be shocked

November 16, 2015
aldraws fashion digital illustration paris girl
I thought I wouldn’t say a word about what happened in Paris on Friday.
Honestly, I didn’t think there was much to say. Just silence and respect.
And I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t have an opinion about it. I was just feeling sad, and sick.
I spent my Sunday trying to process it all on my couch, with my cat on my lap and a heavy feeling of inertia.
Shell shocked, I thought that there was nothing meaningful enough that could be said in a moment like this.

But then I made the big mistake of opening Facebook.
And there they were, the Social Media Columnists.
Everyone and their mother has their opinion, their lesson, their sentence.

The right wing-minded people who shout slogans of death against all Muslims and refugees, in their ungrammatical and almost primitive language, and want all EU borders to be closed.
The wannabe-priests who mistook Facebook for a church where to give their sermon of good Christians.
The left wing, pseudo-intellectuals with their very predictable lessons on who you should be sorry for: “Thousands of people are dying in wars every day in the world, but you feel sorry for just 129 who died in Paris because it’s part of the Western culture”. Or that are publishing very well-argumented dissertations on how this is a lesson we deserved, how it’s normal that it happened because of the wrong political choices of France.

Of all these, the latter kind of Social Media Columnists are the ones that are making me angry the most.
Maybe because it’s the “group” that often shares my thoughts and ideology, the one that I usually relate the most to.
It makes me feel sick now.

And angry, especially because I wanted silence and now I am among the ones who are talking. It pisses me off how much I’m letting them get to me.

But I just need to let it out now, and I want to do it on my blog because I just need to let my anger out in my own personal place.
I know that if someone will read this they might not like it. I don’t care.

To this kind of Social Media Columnists I just want to say one thing: just SHUT UP.

Why does everything always has to become a political debate? Why does such an atrocity has to become a tool to show to the world your Facebook wall how much of a critical thinker you are, how cool you are by getting your news only from independent sources, how not selfish and friend-of-the-World of you is to think of all victims of the wars that are happening globally instead of the “few” people who lost their lives on Friday in Paris?
Why does, in your point of view, feeling bad for Paris exclude feeling bad for everyone else?

We have the right to feel sad and we have the right to mourn who we want.
We have the right to be shocked.

Yes, I am selfish.
Because the people who died in front of Le Carillon were just like me, celebrating the start of the week-end after a long week of work getting a beer with their friends, or a dinner with their boyfriend or girlfriend.
I am selfish because I live half an hour of train ride away from Brussels, where some of the attackers allegedly came from. I am selfish because I know personally people who live in Paris, and I suffer for them.
I am selfish because yes, I relate to the people who died, to their stories and their sufferings, because they are just like me. I am selfish because now I’m scared like hell.

You are selfish too.
Moreover you, who are taking the death of 129 people as an occasion to produce a political pamphlet, are also an hypocrite.
Because I know that you’re scared too.
Because I (and all the others who you find so stupid and selfish because they are #prayingforparis) suffer also for the people who lost their lives in Beirut, those who lose their lives every day in Syria and in all the other conflicts that are going on right now but unlike you, we don’t feel the need to show it and brag about it to feel better or more independent or intelligent .

Just let us feel bad for this horror without your social and political bullshit.

We are all humans and as such we have a limited brain.
Stop playing Illuminated Mastermind, you’re human too. We live in bubbles and for as much open-minded as we can be we still relate the most to whom is most similar to us and to the small habitat around us. We’re animals in the end, and this is as simple as biology.
We play citizens of the world, but our world is actually (and unfortunately) very small.

Thank God your Facebook wall is very small too.

*end of the rant*

You Might Also Like

2 Comments

  • Reply A November 20, 2015 at 2:02 pm

    Oh dear, this is sosososo true!! all those stupid, ignorant people make me so angry and I was thinking of this blog posting a lot during the last few days when reading blogs and social media. Why do they all feel "entitled" to tell us how we're supposed to feel?? xx Astrid

  • Reply Al November 30, 2015 at 11:52 am

    Indeed!
    I do understand the political debate, which I totally approve (and join) now. But that's because it's been 2 weeks already. I just hate the political "lessons" the day after a tragedy and the usual know-it-all's who feel entitled to tell you who to grieve for and how.
    Thank you for your comment xxx

  • Leave a Reply