Running Dry

You let the rest of your life demand your attention for a time, and the next thing you know, it's been a week since the last posting. This is how blogs die, I suppose. But not this one; at least, not just yet, anyway.

Like other social media platforms, LinkedIn has seen a large number of posts that concern themselves with the war between Russia and Ukraine. The one that caught my attention, however was from a Palestinian, who accused "the West" of having a double standard in their attention to the plight of the Ukrainians, while they ignored the situation on the ground in Gaza. Perhaps the poster was referring to the governments of the collection of nations generally known as "the West," or perhaps given the general tenor of public opinion, he was speaking of people more broadly. But in any event, it wasn't a new criticism. Once refugees started fleeing to nations to the west, writers started pointing out that the warm welcomes and open expressions of concern for their well-being were in stark contrast to the cold shoulders that many refuge-seekers from the Middle East, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa were receiving.

And it's valid to point that out. It's perfectly reasonable to say that Palestinians are worthy of the same concern for their well-being as Ukrainians. There's nothing wrong with stating that African migrants deserve the same warm welcome as Slavic migrants. The question becomes whether there is something wrong with the preferences that result in the differences in outcomes. While part of the delta is, quite likely, the belief that once things settle down in Ukraine, one way or another, most of refugees will likely return to their homes, or close to them, I suspect that European attitudes towards Russia, and President Putin personally, also have a lot do to with it.

The question becomes, then, should those factors have anything to do with it? Actually, though, that really isn't the question. The real question is: How does anyone stop those factors, or any others, from having anything, or everything, to do with it? Even when compassion has no visible costs, it's almost never available in unlimited amounts. By this point, that much is more or less a given. So people dole it out in measures based on who they want to have it. As as much as this leaves those who don't receive as much of the world's compassion and care as they need (or any at all, for that matter) out in the cold, this is a general fact of human nature. The problem to be solved here is not the distribution of attention. It's the amount of attention. How humanity actually gets to a post-scarcity attention economy is beyond me. But it's something worth looking into.