Hasta La Gadget!

Screenwriting is an art of fakery. Put a few words of convincing jargon into the mouth of a cop or a corporate lawyer or a starship commander and the audience will believe you are an expert in criminal justice or antitrust law or the rebel alliance on the planet Xenon. Having written a screenplay about historical events in the Middle East doesn’t make me an expert on the region. But spending all day every day at a desk trying to project myself into the minds of other human beings, real or imaginary, has forced me to think in a sustained way about one particular subject: empathy. The ways in which storytellers inspire or coax or educate audiences to bring them to care about a person.

In the thoughtful new documentary Life Itself, the late film critic Roger Ebert describes film as “a machine that generates empathy.” Without empathy for a character, the audience will go to the lobby for popcorn or start thinking about whether that Chinese place is going to be too crowded on a Friday.

As I’ve flipped channels and pages this week considering the all-around tragic situation in Gaza and its rising civilian death toll — and the seeming indifference and resigned shrugs of much of the American public (including, for a while, myself, as I uttered those tautological, anodyne monosyllables: “It is what it is”) — I’ve had to stop and ask myself where in this story empathy has failed. Do we care enough to demand of our ally some curb on civilian deaths? Do we care about the people of Gaza at all? And, if we don’t, why don’t we?

The literary critic and philosopher Elaine Scarry (a teacher of mine), in her essay ‘The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,’ writes: “The way we act toward others is shaped by the way we imagine them.’ She cites a scene in Pushkin, in which opera-goers come out of the theatre weeping for those they’ve seen onstage, not noticing the freezing carriage-drivers who have been suffering in the bitter-cold night to carry them home.

Pushkin knew a thing or two. He might have been describing a crowd leaving King Lear in the Park this week, hearts filled with terror and pity as they step over the homeless man passed out on Central Park West. Shakespeare brings audiences to understand what it’s like to be a semi-mythical king going gaga on a heath — to care about Lear as though we were him, as though dividing kingdoms were a problem we faced in daily life, along with repair delays on the C train and a rash that won’t go away. Great dramatists and filmmakers — like great politicians — make us care about those whose lives are far from our own, make even imaginary people more real to us than living people.

Does anyone doubt that Katniss Everdeen and the fate of District 12 are more real, and more urgent, to many people than the fate of the citizens of Gaza? I wasn’t surprised to read recently that the Thai military — the real-life Thai military! — had banned protestors from using the three-finger salute that symbolizes resistance in Suzanne Collins’ novels and the Hunger Games films. Men carrying actual assault rifles are afraid of an imaginary teenage archer. Such is the political power that comes from imagining the lives, and the pain, of other people.

So while pundits on American television speak of Israel and Gaza, of proportionality of response, of legitimate rights of defense, and political solutions seem hopeless, I’ve come to think that the most urgent question for American citizens is a simpler, humanitarian, one: Can we imagine what it is like to be a civilian in Gaza? (Yes, I’ve heard that argument that there are no civilians in Gaza, because voting for Hamas takes away one’s civilian status. But if an unwise, self-defeating vote were punishable by death, half the world would be wiped out by Thursday and the population crisis would be over).

Imagining lives in Gaza, lives unlike our own, is difficult. It requires knowledge. It is work, but it is necessary — as it is necessary to imagine Israeli lives with equal attention.

I suspect it is easier for an American — at least for this particular American, perhaps the most culturally Jewish non-Jew in the borough of Manhattan — to imagine lives on the Israeli side of the border. We see ourselves there. We have lived — at least in some very fractional way — with the threat of terrorism in our cities, and have seen irrational extremism. We understand — at least some American families do — the chill of kissing a daughter goodbye and sending her off to the armed forces. We have some sense of the astonishing horrors of the 20th century that preceded the Jewish state. We are people united by principles, sensibility, ironic asides, and a shared love of ‘The Voice.’

But the story of Gaza’s civilians remains unimagined, and therefore unimaginable, for most of us. It is a story — a non-story — of nameless women wailing on the news. A story of things: blockades, tunnels, occupation, human shields (consider, for a moment, those two words in that order — a magic trick that turns a person into a thing). Lives that we cannot imagine as vividly and painfully as our own, as completely as Lears and Katnisses, we cannot care about and will step over in the street — with the vague sense that if you’re lying on Central Park West, then you probably deserve to be there. Is the C train running?

As we watch this conflict — or any conflict with civilian casualties halfway around the world (and, believe me, I’m not exempting Syria or Sudan or Iraq — God knows, not Iraq! — or anywhere) — we must not fail to care about a thousand civilian dead.

We must not feel, even in some secret chamber of the heart, that if you were born in a certain place, well, you had it coming to you. We must be our own empathy-generating machines, not satisfied with the general. We must think specifically, and urgently, about human lives, both familiar and foreign, before we shrug. We must imagine — in brutal, quotidian detail — what it feels like to be a civilian on both sides of the border, before we decide how many civilian deaths we will tolerate.

Imagine a grandmother in Tel Aviv carrying groceries home for Shabbat, with nowhere to run as a rocket siren goes off. Imagine a child with a slight limp, for once winning at soccer, underneath the building from which militants fired the rocket. Imagine a father who gets a call that his acoustic-guitarist 18 year-old pacifist, doing mandatory service in the IDF, has been shot and killed. Imagine the mother of a toddler who knows all the words to the songs from Frozen in Arabic, whose skull is crushed in a missile strike.

Political pressure comes from sustained attention. We pay attention to those lives with which we empathize. To imagine the lives of others is not a flight of the mind. It is a moral imperative.