I don’t know about you, but it pains me to read the news. I got rid of TV four years ago because I just couldn’t take it anymore- the heartsickness I felt every time I turned on CNN, where I couldn’t help watching the nonstop coverage of 9/11, the tsunami, child abductions, war casualties, and Katrina.  It’s better now that I can’t see it streaming live 24/7, but I still check in on CNN.com, and even that is almost too tragic for me to bear.

The current tragedy

Take the BP oil spill. Every day, there’s more footage of the environmental disaster, the dying birds, the growing oil slick destroying our ocean, the tragic health consequences, the unforeseen damage this will do to our environment. President Obama just met with the BP officials and he wants them to pay for the cost of this disaster, but how can you set a dollar value to the damage already done and the unimaginable damage that will follow?

I read about it all, and I feel myself start to shut down. I just can’t take it all in. I feel myself building a wall, navigating away from CNN, trying not to think about it.  It’s too awful.

Then you hear about flooding in the Midwest, mass murders, genocide in Africa, and seemingly never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that’s just what the US media deems important enough to report. It tends to turn me into an ostrich, burying my head in the sand and repeating Scarlett O’Hara’s mantra, “I’ll think about it tomorrow.”

Facing it

I know there are activists out there, people who hear about global injustice and natural disasters, and instead of running for the hills, they run for the front line. I’m so grateful these people exist, and I admire their moxie, their passion, their take-charge attitudes, their save-the-world souls.  But the truth is, I’m not one of them.  I can only handle so much suffering in my life.

It’s not that I’m too soft to handle tragedy.  After all, I’m a doctor. So I’ve sat at many bedsides during many deaths. I’ve delivered babies who died in the womb. I’ve told many a father that he’s lost not only his baby, but his wife.  I’ve witnessed a man who fell into a vat of molten metal walk himself to the ER only to die on the front doorstep of the hospital. I can’t say I’ve led a particularly sheltered existence.

For some reason, I can handle these tragedies, knowing that I am there to help ease the suffering - that even if I can’t prevent the inevitable sadness, I can hold a hand, wipe a brow, express love and compassion, cradle a dying baby in my arms while the mother sobs. I can be fully present and keep my heart open and cry my eyes out.

Helplessness

But things like the BP oil spill leave me feeling so helpless. I don’t know how to ease my own sense of suffering, much less that of a dying pelican.  I can’t leave my family to go stand on the front line and mop up oil on Gulf Coast beaches. I don’t choose to fly to Haiti when an earthquake happens. Instead, I get sick to my stomach and just turn off CNN.

I know it’s important to be informed. You can’t live your life in a vacuum, and history merely repeats itself if we don’t learn our societal lessons along the way. But where do you draw the line? It sounds naïve and oh-so-Pollyanna, but maybe ignorance is bliss.  Maybe I don’t need to poison my psyche with never-ending tragedies that I can’t do anything about. Maybe it’s enough to serve the world in the way I can, knowing that it’s enough, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

How do you handle these things?  How much information is too much? How do you handle the pain and suffering of world tragedies? How do you get your brain around something so awful that the scope of the imagination can only barely begin to contain it?

Shutting down now,

Lissa