Not Our Place

Season Two of A Series of Unfortunate Events just came out. Once again, the series has reminded me to consume media and use social media platforms in a responsible way.

Several years ago, following some kind of national tragedy, a classmate posted something on Facebook that I’ll never forget. (Disclaimer: by that I mean, “I’ll never forget the gist of it,” not that I have it memorized or something.) The classmate said something to this effect: one of their family members once passed away in a violent incident. People of all different political views seized the incident to promote their preferred political causes. The classmate said that while all of these people had points, using this classmate’s family member’s death to promote their own agenda was incredibly insensitive and interfered with the family’s grieving process. Basically, the classmate suggested that we not use tragedies that didn’t personally affect us to further our political causes. At least not right away. There should be a space that’s private and only for grief before political rallying begins.

That perspective deeply affected me. Over the years, I've come to agree that space is needed for people to grieve after tragedies. In fact, I would argue that maybe the political rallying should never begin. Obviously there's value in talking about the meaning of things, but is it our place to decide the meaning of someone else's personal experience? Is that really okay?

When my classmate shared their feelings on the topic, another classmate retorted that they believed the personal is political. It's okay to believe that, and it's okay to use our own personal experiences to promote our political agendas if that's what we want to do. But it's not really okay to decide for other people that their personal experiences must be politicized.