Abraham Maslow includes the human need to be loved, appreciated, to feel one's place and to gain dignity, and argues that these should be met in a reasonable way. As it is known, in our traditional culture, these needs were met through relationships with family members, relatives and friends and passed on from generation to generation.
The capitalist system has destroyed this structure and people have become unable to connect with their first degree relatives, let alone friendships. Children, who were deprived of the gains of family relations, turned to social media tools in order to meet their needs to love, be loved and get approval.
Social media is a bottomless pit and slowly grinds up everything it puts into it. Now, our people display everything from their family life to the places they go to, the shopping they do, the money they spend, their fights, their loves, their personal accounts, and they try to make their presence felt by diving into this bottomless well.
You see, an unhappy and dull-faced family is sitting at a terrible table, posing, and they are pleased as if the whole world is staring at them. Tables set, shopping, entertainment, everything is turned into selfies, and people act according to comments from people they don't know. Our enthusiasm to show ourselves on social media has become so commonplace that we have come to recognize no rights, laws and borders in this regard. As you know, an officer in the earthquake zone tried to take selfies and take advantage of the situation by posing with the child, who was unconscious from under the rubble, instead of taking him to the hospital last week.
You can measure people's knowledge level and score them numerically, but you cannot measure their conscientiousness, value perceptions, and compassion. Ok, it is a part of human actions, expressions, attitudes and behaviors, but when an assignment is made, relevant institutions and organizations are not interested in the person's perception of value, they only measure their knowledge and decide.
If there was a tool that could measure the compassion of the people who will take charge in disaster areas, I am sure that the sensitivities of the people would be taken into account, not the scores they get.
When the person who photographed the pain of the injured child in his arms instead of taking him to the hospital met with the reactions of the public, he said, "I felt the need to shoot such a shot because of excitement when I took the child alive"...
How? What did you do? Or what would you do in such a situation? As an injured child approaches death, won't you hold your breath and run towards the ambulance with him?
While the child is struggling to breathe, won't you forget everything and embrace his pain? Will you not raise your head and pray with a voice that will make the heavens and the earth moan? While the child in your arms is out of breath, won't you feel his pain in your whole soul and body and accompany with your tears? What are you? What family did you come from? From where? Are you a moving robot? Are you so disconnected from life that you cannot feel the flutter of the child you carry in your arms?
You remember, there was a photograph taken in 1993 by a photographer named Kevin Carter. Carter went to South Sudan, which is facing a great famine, on a ship belonging to the United Nations, and took that photograph that was engraved on our consciences here.
In the photograph, there was a black girl lying curled up on the floor like a handkerchief, and a short distance away a vulture was waiting for her death to eat her. Kevin Carter took a photo of the child instead of helping, and this photo depicting the death of humanity was awarded the Pulützer prize.
Instead of helping the starving child, the journalist who said that my job is just to take pictures and left him as bait for the vulture received a lot of backlash and committed suicide. Unfortunately, such attitudes can be encountered wherever people breathe and in such cases, those who wear compassion come together and become stronger. And their voice dissolves all evil.