One of the greatest inventions of our time is the Google Map.
Gone are the days of having to unfold a giant and unwieldy sheet of paper to try to see where we are and how to get somewhere else. Now we hold in our hands a device that conjures up an electronic map that zooms in and out with the simple movement of two fingertips. We can hone in as close as our driveway or as far out as the whole planet.
Most of us live in that version of life’s Google Map that stays in close. We get our children to school. We get ourselves to work. We think about what food to eat, what clothes to buy, and how to ready our homes for the coming winter.
But this map of the world is an illusion. It leaves out the events around us that do not show up when we zoom in only on our own lives. We live, for the most part, in content obliviousness — a condition that will come back to haunt us.
There is a new war in the world, a new episode of great suffering. Yes, there is analysis and debate to be had about the violent attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists and Israel’s brutal retaliations. But beneath it there is only suffering.
This morning I read an interview with a Palestinian physician, Dr. Hammam Alloh, who described what it is like to tend to the horrific injuries of adults and children caught under Israel’s bombing. Some endure operations for which no anesthesia is available. “We are being exterminated,” he said of the bombings. On Saturday he was killed when one of those bombs hit his home. He was 36 and the father of two small children.
Even though we are connected to this war (U.S money, U.S. weapons) his death will not show up on the comfortable Google Map of our lives.
Humanity is sleepwalking into an environmental crisis of our own creation, one that will alter the futures of our children in ways we do not want to think about. Climate change, with its record heat waves and monster storms, is only one part. We are depleting the groundwater we need to grow our food and pouring toxic chemicals into our water, soil and bodies.
But we are distracted by other things.
America is also sleepwalking into the most dangerous threat to democracy in our lifetime. We witness the rise of a political culture that considers it perfectly fine to violently storm the nation’s capitol with the aim of overturning a lawful election. We have a candidate seeking to regain the presidency who led that effort and who openly claims as his role models for power, not Jefferson and Lincoln, but Putin and Xi Jinping.
But we will pretend it is all just normal politics.
I wish that I could just live content in the beautiful world with boundaries that stretch only as far as I can ride my bicycle. A world that revolves around getting my granddaughter to the school bus, enjoying the piles of autumn leaves, and being around people who worry about things like whether the Buffalo Bills might still make the NFL playoffs, not bombs falling on their children.
But I can’t. I have set foot in too many parts of the world and have seen too much of all this up close. I have seen what war brings, in Central America in the 1980s, and spent time with a mother who lost her daughter to an attack our tax dollars paid for. In the streets of Bolivia I saw close-up what a despot really does to hold power. I can still recall the stench and sting of the tear gas and the sound of lethal rubber bullets hitting walls. I was recently in Africa and briefed by UN workers about the desperate exodus coming in the face of environmental collapse.
We can choose, if we want to, to keep our heads buried in the sand and our Google Maps focused close in. We can pretend that nothing beyond the confines of our own lives is really our concern. We can take comfort in that part of the Serenity Prayer that reads, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”
But that is not the connected world we live in. What lies beyond our daily lives is hidden just off to the side. When we ignore war, when we skim over news of an environmental crisis, when we pretend that our democracy will survive anything, like a stubborn weed — that is obliviousness. It will come back to haunt us, badly, if we do not pay attention and do what is in our power to do.