The tragedy of gun violence is not merely a 30-second news headline nor a blip in our otherwise mindless media algorithms. It haunts me, my community, and so many more since. What does it mean that we can just scroll past real human suffering?
I was in the third grade when my opportunities for blissful scrolling beyond the tears from hurting communities ceased. Surviving the elementary school shooting at Sandy Hook in 2012 became a national event. Largely unprecedented in both scale and age of victims, it dominated national news for weeks.
Yet reducing our experience in such objective terms is an incomplete picture. Longer than the time in the limelight, over two dozen families were devastated, hundreds more grieving friends, and a school full of young children, like myself, sentenced to carry the weight of our trauma well into adulthood. Judging from the news trucks parking outside of our soccer practices and police blockades outside of our new school, you may have cared about us then.
However, the indifference of our modern media consumption and its rapid-fire news cycles indicate that you do not care anymore. Not about us, and certainly not about the hundreds of communities who have been devastated by gun violence since. Our desensitization to violence, both domestically and globally, speaks to the vulnerability of human rights as a moral endeavor. If we are to truly support human rights, we first must relearn to care beyond our own communities.
Back home, nearly everyone supports gun control. Many of my classmates have grown into activists, shouting into a bureaucratic abyss demanding change. When tragedy uproots your backyard, it would be outlandish to not care. But when it happens elsewhere, we now have the privilege to scroll past it. We scroll past human pain and are greeted on the other side of that scroll by advertisements and influencers to shake that pesky sense of empathy.
Be it gun violence in local American communities or fully fledged war in Gaza or Myanmar, we have the luxury to watch – or more likely, not watch – from afar, through our screens. Our concept of human rights has become conditional. Where we once believed in universal human dignity, our circle of moral concern has narrowed to those most proximate to us.
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s cosmopolitanism provides a framework for discussing and understanding human rights. The core tenets of Appiah’s conception of cosmopolitanism include respect for legitimate difference and universal concern. Appiah encourages us to value our deep roots in local communities, cultures, and people while also acknowledging that we have moral obligations beyond them, duty to our global neighbors, too. The integrity of the human rights regime, in the institutional embodiment of cosmopolitan values, is thereby undermined by our growing apathy for our global neighbors, as our concern for others becomes conditional on its social, cultural, or merely geographical bounds.
Human rights, since they rely on shared values of the dignity of others, are not inherently self-enforcing. International institutions like the United Nations Human Rights Council and United Nations Relief and Works Agency were founded on this common moral conviction. However, the modern erosion of such conviction has resulted in instances like the United States cuts to funding global aid programs and withdrawing from prominent human rights bodies, undermining their legitimacy and capacity to act. The harsh truth about international organizations is that they are founded and fueled by common normative behaviors, hinging upon the public consciousness for voluntary state support as they lack enforcement power themselves. Moreover, the collapse of international institutions reflecting values of human dignity reinforces the public indifference that retracted its support in the first place. Put bluntly, if we do not care about each other, no one will.
The failure of upholding human rights starts not with institutions, but the individual. The desensitization that allows us to scroll past international tragedy is the same numbness that allows us to ignore the increasing prevalence of shootings just a town away. Until we recover our capacity to empathize with strangers, we cannot claim to subscribe to human rights. Supporting human dignity is not best done in conference rooms or courtrooms, but first, the individual capacity to care.
Isabella Butler of Sandy Hook, Conn. is Boston College, class of 2026.