It isn’t easy making sense of our selective sensitivities

Almost everyone cares. We care about the fate of little girls kidnapped from their homes and little boys trapped on cliff faces they’ve tried to climb. We care about injured animals and about adults afflicted with killing diseases.

Our caring is selective, but it’s there. We care in the singular, but not always the plural. Remember Kathy Fiscus? We prayed for her survival 54 years ago as rescuers worked for two days to bring her up from the San Marino well she’d fallen into. When word spread that she was dead, the whole world cried.

When the conjoined Alvarez babies from Guatemala underwent surgery to separate them, we held our breath. When they survived, we cheered. And then, as if to test our degree of charity, came the Bijani twins, Laleh and Ladan, from Iran.

At 29, they lacked the cuddly quality of the Alvarez girls, but their condition was no less severe. Joined at the head, they opted to risk death in a critical operation to free them from each other rather than continue as they were.

No one had ever tried to separate adult twins joined that way. When news of their wish to be separated began circulating, we took notice, and our compassion kicked in. Yes, they were Iranians, and Iran is a part of President Bush’s “axis of evil,” but still, they were human beings, right?

For some, it was a moral dilemma. They had to ponder whether or not praying for citizens of an “enemy” nation might not shift public sentiment into the camp of believing that Iranians mattered, that these were individuals in pain, despite the fact they were from a country we had been told to despise.

God plays funny tricks sometimes, locking us into deformities that cause others to turn away. But here were these two plucky young women whose plight we could somehow understand, so we turned to watch as they were wheeled into surgery and waited with anticipation as surgeons began two days of risky work in Singapore.

Americans waited along with Iranians. Potential enemies were as one in the focus of their concern over two individuals seeking a better life. When doctors stood before a battery of microphones to announce their failure and the deaths of Laleh and Ladan, if we didn’t cry, we at least cared. Humanity had seeped through.

I thought about this one night as the 11 o’clock news ended. I began wondering about the selective nature of compassion, how we can pour so much grief into the plight of one person and so much rage into the killings of thousands at war. Joseph Stalin, himself a mass murderer, was said to have remarked, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

There is truth contained in an attitude he adopted to desensitize himself to the deaths he had caused. We understand the humanity in the individual, but somehow lack the ability to connect with the humanity of the masses.

Dr. Gerald Larue, an emeritus professor of religion at USC, tells about the young soldier in World War II who watched an American army sergeant shoot a German soldier in the head. It didn’t bother him at first, because Germany was an enemy nation -- but then the soldier realized that the dead German looked like his brother. And at that instant, the enemy became a human being.

Our national hatreds, Larue said, are controlled by propaganda. Our natural tendencies are to reach out, to help, but we are gullible to a barrage of words from government or from the media that can send us rushing off to war and mass killings. It doesn’t have to be that way. “Critical thinking,” Larue said, “makes us aware of each other. It puts us into the place of other people and changes the way we respond to the news or to government.” A blind response to propaganda, he implies, creates a nation of robots.

We use labels, Larue added, “to justify what we’re doing in war. It eases the pain of watching someone suffer. We’re just wiping out evil.”

One would think that by now, the human race would be aware of the contradiction that causes us to mourn for one while killing thousands. If we could expand the humanity in individuality to embrace the multitudes, we’d make a quantum leap up from savagery.

I’m not sure why I got into all of this today. I’m not a philosopher. I guess it’s just that the Bijani twins came to represent the dichotomy that exists between caring and hating. There is a terrible irony in the attitudes that prevail in the world today. Thousands lie in mass graves as a result of history’s butchery. Only when one person dies do we stop to wonder what it’s all about. And that makes me wonder too.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.