Notre Dame Grief: A Religious Irony
The majority of recent mass-shootings and terror attacks have been targeted towards people attending places of worship or have been performed against a religious group. Some of the most recent and massive attacks include the Rohingya genocide in Burma (August 2017-present), Pittsburgh shooting (October 17th, 2018), New Zealand shooting (March 15th, 2019), the Sri Lanka bombing (April 22nd, 2019), the modern-day Holocaust on Uighur Muslims in China, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, growing anti-Christianity motives in Southeast Asia, and Shia-Muslim executions in Sunni-Muslim countries. This list is lengthy but still falls short. Today, April 27th, 2019, there was a shooting at a synagogue in North Carolina, and a veteran near San Diego drove into pedestrians because he thought they were Muslim. In this case, “veteran” is a funny way to spell “terrorist”, but nonetheless, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are evident in these acts.
In other recent news, on April 15th, 2019, there was a fire that broke out in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The fire was started by either “a short-circuit near its spire, possibly caused by electrified bells, or negligence by workers carrying out renovations, a theory fueled by the discovery of cigarette butts” (Nossiter, NYT). Luckily, in this fire, no lives were lost and not all of the art in Notre Dame burned. I knew many people were going to be upset — as was I, but the amount of grief shown by non-Parisians was unexpectedly large. That day I made sure to view all of the social media posts of friends, acquaintances, celebrities, and other influencers. I saw endless streams of peoples’ vacation photos from Paris, and endless reposts of one particular photo from when the cathedral was burning.
Forget the photos; let’s talk about money- the driving factor of this world. The Notre Dame Cathedral received over $1billion in donations from billionaires, international corporations, elite Western families, and fashion powerhouses. Francis-Henri Pinault, the executive director of Kering (the company that owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen), and Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LMVH (the company that owns Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Celine, Dior, and Kenzo) made pledges over $100 million. “Pinault has promised over $100 million, according to BBC to rebuild the UNESCO world heritage site. Meanwhile, the Arnault family and LMVH will donate over $200 million to the site, which they consider a “core part of the French history,” and also offer their “relevant” services. L’Oreal’s founding company, the Bettencourts, will also donate $200 million.” (Goldfine, Papermag).
The reason why I was so shocked to see such an uproar of sadness from the general American public was that no one posts when a major tragedy is done to humans. There are countless wide-scale atrocities that are happening as you read this, but the lives lost during those atrocities are not remembered, honored, or even thought about in countries outside of their own.
The problem that is holding the world back from achieving its full potential is hypocrisy. It is almost as if everyone has been numbed to the rising death polls, war, and genocides that are happening during our existence.
A lot of people want to preserve art and history, which was the reasoning behind all of the grief for Notre Dame, but it seems as if people are not interested in leaving a remarkable legacy and history for future generations to be inspired by, but instead are devoted to preserving previous history. This is a lazy and pathetic motive for a population to have, as each person that dies due to injustice, weaponry or political motive is a loss of history and art. Sure, most of those people would not make it to a textbook or a news article, but locally, personally, or inter-personally those people would make history. It is unfortunate that we regard ourselves as high potential and valuable, but quickly dissolve massive-scale deaths as if it weren’t actually happening. People are too used to seeing numbers as people tend to not associate much emotion with figures reporting wide-scale deaths and injuries.
The rising trend in targeted attacks towards religious groups is frightening, especially for those who are religious. The mass shooting at Christchurch and last summer’s attacks towards Muslims in London panicked and affected Muslims worldwide. Ramadan is in a week, which means that Muslims will be more regularly going to mosques, and the importance of religion will be more prominent compared to other times of the year. This for sure is a drastic change in the world’s history; until recently, religion used to be the center of many cultures and lives. Today, it is clear through these attacks that people are running away from religion and, to some extremes, condoning it.
The irony of the tragedies done within this past week is that during the Notre Dame burning, people said having Easter Sunday later in the week made the burning sadder since people who would normally go to Notre Dame to worship would not be able to. Even the Pope was willing to fly into Paris and see Notre Dame, but due to security advising, he did not. The Notre Dame fire is a big deal for Christianity’s history as should be the bombing in Sri Lanka. In fact, Sri Lanka should be a massive deal- 259 people died with over 500 injured. These numbers speak for a Christian population of 7% in Sri Lanka, an obviously targeted minority (Al-Jazeera). All across South Asia, there have been increased attacks towards Christian populations, which should be a priority concern for the Vatican.
Unfortunately, race plays a massive role. Christianity peaked during the Roman Empire, which accounts for the majority of Christianity’s history. This racism is shown in the media’s coverage during the Sri Lanka bombing. Many news sources shared information about foreigners who died in the bombing: “eight British nationals”, “ASOS CEO’s three children”, “a Portuguese man”, “’ Several’ US citizens”, and “Turkish engineers” (Jackson, CNN). These lives that were lost matter just as much as all of the Sri Lankan civilians, but the point here is that this shows what the media has to display in order to get the world interested in the attack.
Selective empathy is dehumanizing- the purest form of hypocrisy, yet this world’s most widespread moral issue.
Only in relation to Western lives does most of the world find this attack to be relevant. This harsh reality pertains to every humanitarian crisis that has happened in modern history and to all of the crises bound to come in the near future. In another perspective, adding in the information about these foreigners helps put these attacks into perspective for many countries. It is a reminder that if this can happen in Sri Lanka, it can happen in any other country with a Christian population.
One step to tackling media injustices would be for people to start spreading the news about problems that are happening in the world. It is easy to complain about the media, but in some ways, the media reflects what the general public is interested in so it is worthwhile to engage more people, and talk about issues that do not directly relate to one’s personal life. At the same time, the media does hold immense power and is influential enough to make people worried about these large-scale injustices. The Western and developed world, which is the part of the world that has the most access to universal media, is most capable of solving these injustices and helping to protect less-privileged people globally. Now it depends on whether “foreigners” will begin to worry about the state of the world and try to change the ongoing deadly violence, or just choose to not visit countries like Sri Lanka. It seems like they’ll choose the latter.
