Othering - Aug 27 2026

 

Othering

Aug 27 2026

I read about a flood in a far-off place.

There were pictures of people covered in mud,

weeping mothers,

entire structures razed. 

But fellow feeling

is like light

transmitted through space;

it declines with distance 

according to the inverse square.

We may be citizens of the world

but can’t help looking inward,

home and family

coming first.

We feel closer

to people like ourselves,

put those we know

before the other.

So much so, the noun has become a verb.

Now, we other

when strangers suffer,

whether collectively

or one at a time.

We protect ourselves by distancing,

notice difference

instead of commonality,

and suppress the nagging  guilt

that accompanies apathy

like a dark persistent shadow. 

Of course, we all have our private calamities.

I had my own small flood

when, in a soggy spring

the lazy creek overflowed.

No one wrote a headline

or flashed the news around the world.

No one wept

or paid attention 

and I’m OK with that. 

Disaster strikes

while distance insulates.

So when you’re warm and dry

with a roof over your head

I understand changing the channel, turning the page.

After all, there’s too much suffering in the world

and too far away

for your sagging shoulders not to slump some more,

weary back to bear it all

and not, in time, break.

Today, it was a devastating flood in Nepal. Literally halfway around the world. 

I marvelled at the power of moving water. I saw pictures of selfless people helping others, and felt grateful to have an antidote to all the cruelty I otherwise see in the news. I reflected on climate change as a likely factor, then grew angry once again at the truculent deniers. But what I didn’t do was feel a rush of empathy, or stop reading then and there. Let alone cry. My reaction was intellectual, not visceral. I turned the page. 

Partly, because I’ve become inured to this faraway suffering. There’s only so much I can feel, or can let myself. And partly, because it’s the tribal nature of human beings. We look out for those know or are close to home, and more easily share their distress: people who look and sound like us; people we can identify with.

There is something called the Dunbar number, and it represents a kind of psychosocial limit. It’s app 150, which is the number of people we know firsthand, whose names and faces are familiar to us. It also represents the typical size of a nomadic group in our hunter/gatherer past:  blood kin, as well as chosen family. Beyond this inner circle, people become more abstract, more easily dehumanized. 150 or so, the people whose suffering truly moves us: a small number, inscribed in our DNA.

Verbing is not uncommon. And despite the protestations of tiresome pedants like me, these words become normalized. English, as it evolves, verbs nouns repeatedly. In fact, I just did!