Non-Compassionate Response (and Rant) to Dying to Tell a Story Documentary

Recently, my creative writing journalism class watched a documentary on a journalist, Dan Eldon, who was killed while in Somalia. It mostly related to conflict in Somalia around 1993 or so, but still managed to centralize on his sister uncovering more about her brother's death. Sure, it was a tragedy, but nonetheless, it was depressing. Living in America immediately makes one all the more privileged than other people in Somalia or Egypt, for instance. So when a person sees tragedy like that flashed on TV and everyone is supposed to sympathize, I guess it may come natural... at first it's easy, but over time I find it hard.

Today in AP, I had to watch a documentary about slavery in Haiti that still continues today. It wasn't the first documentary I had to watch about horrible things happening to poverished people. Growing up in love with Time Warner cable, the shows I constantly watched were flooded with commercials that had old white men holding poverished Africans and wanting my help, sympathy, and donations. Now, it's the same thing, but no one wants money this time, but change. I may sound heartless, but seeing these horrible things happen to regular people just eventually made me so desensitized. It's like my mind powers down when I have to watch those kinds of things in class, I just don’t feel a thing. I'm uninterested. I'm unmotivated. There's nothing I can do to help the Haitians who have to pick sugarcanes for the rest of their lives or the Egyptians who have an incorrigible ruler. All I can do is watch something on TV that doesn't and probably never will apply to me. I have no desire to travel abroad and document things like that. I have no desire to even watch the news nowadays, except for the temperature.

I think it's a shame that those kinds of things have to happen, but I am just so jaded and malcontent with everything, my viewing experiences simply don't even matter unless I have to do something like this. Besides, there’s something disturbing in every documentary I've noticed that makes me just want to close my eyes tight and sleep for good. In every documentary, there is always a Caucasian male who travels to learn more about a subject, and on the way makes friends with the indigenous natives. They all smile, and hug, like everything is going to be alright, and then later the white man asks the audience for sympathy when it's one-on-one camera time. I find it disturbing, to be honest. Now I'm just in a full blown rant, but it kind of feels like white man guilt. Maybe I should delete that. Maybe I'm looking too much into documentaries that I prefer to not watch. I think it's better for cynical people like me to sleep through tragic things like that, than watch and have my mind be plagued with disturbing scenes from those documentaries.