A train wreck happens in Spain. Sixty-eight people are dead. Some are Americans.

There it is. The American connection.

A flood tears through a foreign country. Homes disappear. Families are buried in mud and rubble. Children are dead. Parents are dead. Entire communities are devastated.

But somewhere in the headlines, we need to know how many Americans were caught in it.

Because apparently, the tragedy becomes a little more tragic when one of our own is involved.

And I have a question.

What the hell makes us so special?

What makes an American life worth mentioning separately? What makes our dead worthy of special attention? What makes our missing citizens more newsworthy than the thousands of people who live in the places where these disasters happen?

Are we more human?

Do we feel pain differently? Do our mothers cry harder? Do our children leave bigger holes in the hearts of the people who love them?

When a mother in Nepal loses her child, does she grieve less than an American mother? When a family in Spain watches their world fall apart, is their suffering somehow diminished because they don’t have American passports?

Of course not.

But we keep doing this. We keep drawing lines around our compassion, dividing the world into us and them, as though humanity were a private club and citizenship were the membership card.

We do it with disasters. We do it with wars. We do it with poverty, hunger, violence, and death.

We do it when we decide which victims deserve our outrage and which ones are just another statistic.

And then we wonder why the world is so full of hatred.

We wonder where the racism comes from. We wonder why people can look at another human being and see an enemy instead of a person. We wonder how entire populations can be dehumanized until their deaths become acceptable, inevitable, or simply not worth discussing.

Maybe we ought to look at the ways we practice that dehumanization ourselves.

Not every time. Not every person. Not every news story.

But often enough to ask some uncomfortable questions.

Why does the suffering of strangers so frequently need a connection to our own lives before we pay attention?

Why do we need to recognize someone’s nationality, religion, ethnicity, or political affiliation before we decide how much their life matters?

Why does compassion so often stop at the borders of our own comfort?

And who taught us that this was normal?

I am an American. I understand why Americans want to know whether their loved ones are safe. I understand why families deserve answers when someone they love is missing or dead in another country.

But that is not what I am questioning.

I am questioning the idea that our connection to a tragedy somehow makes it more important than the tragedy itself.

I am questioning a world in which a headline can make us care about a handful of American victims while the suffering of hundreds or thousands of local people fades into the background.

I am questioning why we have become so comfortable measuring human suffering by how closely it touches us.

Because those people had names, too.

They had families waiting for them to come home. They had children who expected their parents to walk through the door. They had unfinished plans, stupid arguments they wished they could take back, people they loved, and people who loved them.

They had favorite songs. They had bad days. They had bills to pay and dinners to make and dreams they hadn’t gotten around to chasing yet.

They were not background characters in an American news story.

They were the people whose country was falling apart around them.

And their lives did not become less valuable because they were born somewhere else.

A passport is not a measure of human worth.

Neither is the color of your skin. Neither is your religion. Neither is your political allegiance. Neither is whether you were born on the right side of a border drawn by people who died long before you were born.

And yet we keep finding ways to sort human beings into categories. Worth saving. Worth mourning. Worth defending. Worth believing.

Worth less.

We give those categories different names. National security. National interest. Religious identity. Political necessity. The greater good.

Sometimes there are legitimate differences between situations. Sometimes governments have real obligations to their own citizens. Sometimes the facts are complicated, and the choices are terrible.

But none of that changes the fundamental truth.

A human life does not become more valuable because it belongs to us.

And it does not become less valuable because it belongs to someone else.

I am tired of a world that can count its dead with mathematical precision while somehow forgetting the humanity behind the numbers.

I am tired of watching people argue about which victims deserve sympathy, which deaths deserve outrage, and which suffering can be explained away.

I am tired of the endless insistence that our people are somehow different from their people.

Because when we strip away the flags, the borders, the religious labels, the political slogans, and all the other excuses we use to separate ourselves, we are left with something very simple.

Human beings.

Fragile, complicated, imperfect human beings who love, suffer, fear, hope, and die.

And every single one of them leaves someone behind.

So the next time you read about a train wreck in Spain, a flood in Asia, a bombing in the Middle East, or a disaster anywhere else on this planet, ask yourself a question.

Not how many Americans were killed.

Not how many people shared your religion, your politics, or your nationality.

Ask yourself why we need to be reminded that the victims were human beings before we decide to care.

Because if our compassion requires us to find something of ourselves in every victim before we can mourn them, then perhaps the problem isn’t that the world has too little humanity.

Perhaps the problem is that we have made our own humanity far too small.

And I, for one, am damn tired of pretending that is acceptable.

 

Kelly and Rowan