An 11-year-old was killed in America.
An 11-year-old was killed on the East Coast.
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An 11-year-old was killed in the nation’s capital.
Those three sentences are about the same child who met the same fate, and yet our minds react to them differently. Each hits with a different force.
As someone who has written hundreds of stories about people after they’ve died — and recently found myself writing about someone as they died — I’ve long been fascinated with the power of proximity when it comes to empathy.
Should I mention a person’s hometown in the first paragraph? Should I weave it into the fifth? These are the types of questions I ask myself when chronicling someone’s life, knowing that we, as humans, are programmed to care more about a stranger if they lived near us. It’s easy to ache for someone’s loss if they came from our home state, and it’s even easier if they came from our neighborhood.
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But that makes the opposite also true. Physical distance allows for emotional distance. Consider the photos U.S. media outlets publish of the dead or dying. Most show horrors that occurred in other countries. On the rare occasions that those photos have shown domestic incidents, it was only because what happened was so awful that words and non-graphic photos alone couldn’t convey that. One example is the “falling man” photo that shows a person jumping from the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. Publications across the country ran it and then faced the task of defending their reasons for doing so to people who were upset at seeing such a disturbing image.
Years ago when I spoke to Nardyne Jefferies, she described people also turning away from a photo of her daughter. The D.C. teenager was killed in the South Capitol Street massacre, a shooting that saw nine people injured and three fatally wounded. Afterward, Jefferies didn’t want people to see her beautiful 16-year-old’s smiling face and move on. She wanted them to see what she saw after that shooting and take action. She placed her daughter’s post-autopsy picture on a poster board and shoved it in front of politicians, hoping it would show them what gun violence really looks like and compel them to do something about it.
This mother wants you to see a disturbing photo of her fatally shot daughter. Maybe it’s time we look.
“She was trying to show us it isn’t all flowers and balloons and sidewalks streaked with wax from candlelight vigils,” I wrote at the time. “It also isn’t what we see next to many victims’ profiles: smiling faces, selfies in front of scenic vacation spots and photos of families with arms interlocked. Those images show life and happiness. They show moments when goals were still being set, futures still being imagined and petty fights still being held because how could anyone know how quickly it was all going to be swiped away.”
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Jefferies knew that photo of her daughter was unsettling.
She also believed people needed to feel unsettled.
I have been thinking a lot about Jefferies lately, and not just because 12 years after her daughter’s death, gun violence in the city has only gotten more deadly.
I have been thinking about her because we are in a moment when it is impossible to look online and not feel unsettled.
Like many people, I’ve found myself doom-scrolling day after day lately. I go from reading one painful account of what’s happening in Ukraine to diving deep into another. Because I live in the D.C. region, I also spend time reading social media posts about the many carjackings and homicides that have been occurring.
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If you have also been doom-scrolling lately, maybe you feel guilty about it. Maybe you’ve even seen warnings telling you to stop. On those social media platforms, there are plenty of posts from well-intentioned people advising you to close your computer and take a break.
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“Empathy starts with yourself,” reads one of those posts.
“Doomscrolling checkpoint: hi, if you’re reading this, and you’ve been seeing bad news all day, remember — you can be informed, but if it’s too much, you can always stop,” reads another.
“I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it’s 1000% okay to log off during times of trauma,” reads yet another. “You aren’t an awful person for wanting to avoid images of horror and uninformed people arguing about them.”
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That last one comes from the Twitter account of David Nu？ez, the director of technology and digital strategy at the MIT Museum. In a thread of tweets, he makes several strong points about the dangers of doom-scrolling that are worth reading, including this one: “Since your brain thinks all those explosions are happening right inside your smartphone, doom-scrolling causes your body to produce stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Your brain is screaming ‘fight or flight’ over a bunch of pixels on your screen.”
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During normal times, I would agree with all those warnings. Seeking out disturbing content for the sake of simply seeing it benefits no one. It can erode a person’s mental health and view of the world. It also does not honor the subjects of that content.
But when the doom is real and the stakes are high, as they are now, I think it’s worth acknowledging that some good can come of doom-scrolling. That’s not a popular opinion, I know, and I respect the reasons people might disagree. I also think that if someone has experienced mental health struggles, they should give themselves permission to look away. But I agree with Jefferies — sometimes we need to look at things that disturb us and let ourselves feel unsettled. Good things can come from people seeing awful things, and we are witnessing that happen right now with Ukraine.
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People are going on hunger strikes in support of Ukrainians. People are donating to organizations and individuals who are providing direct aid to Ukrainians. People are displaying flags outside their homes that represent children and adults who live in a place nowhere near them. They are showing empathy that is not based on proximity.
Here's how Americans can help people in Ukraine
I have seen people in my life who have rarely talked about international events, scrolling and scrolling, and then taking action. That has been incredible to witness.
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I have also, as a journalist, seen the opposite. I have seen people scroll past stories and posts about other life-or-death issues and do nothing, or too little, to bring about change.
That 11-year-old I told you about was real. His name was Davon McNeal, and he was killed on the Fourth of July in the nation’s capital during an anti-violence cookout in 2020. He is one of at least five children the District has lost to gun violence since 2018, years that have seen the city’s annual homicide totals nearly double.