General News IS beheads Henning, threatens American hostage.

That works for understanding a tradition or two, but not for a massacre. It comes across less like natural differences as it does deliberate devaluation.

Am I to understand that the French, Bahrainis, Danes and Saudis can understand the English more than they can Syrians and Iraqis?

 

Part of it is that it is difficult to picture it happening to you if the people being affected are not "your people". When it happens to fellow Englishmen or Americans, it makes it seem more real to you and more threatening. That's another reason why people react more strongly to their own countrymen dying than they do to people in another country. Even more so if the deaths happen on their own soil.

Maybe it is deliberate devaluation, I don't know. But I do think it is at least in part natural to "look out" for people from your country.

 

You're right, in terms of how many people think this way, though myself, and many I know, think it's just as tragic to see any innocent person die. As a human, I can still relate to loss, even outside of my own culture. A life is a life, and those of my home country mean not a jot more to me; it's based on the person, not the nation they were randomly born into.

But I think you've pointed out the crux of so many problems: the idea of 'us' and 'them' or "one of us"/ "not one of us" a binary way of facile thought and ginned up emotion that has caused a great deal of harm though the ages.

I live in a diverse city, where many people don't look at all like my own European ethnicity; Baltimore is at least 67% black, and has many other 'minorities'...so I can't even say what this so called 'us' would look like, aside from a tapestry of many sorts of people, all of whose lives I value, as humans.

 

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