People have to make a life within circumstances they would never have chosen. There are meals to prepare, relatives to worry about, small pleasures worth keeping. Even under repression, ordinary life continues. From a safe distance, that continuity can be dangerously easy to misunderstand.
A person finding a way through the day has not necessarily accepted the conditions imposed on them. They may simply have another day to get through.
8AM Media reports Bennett’s warning that the Taliban’s institutionalised repression and discrimination must not become normalised. The supplied report offers little detail beyond that warning, so it cannot support a fuller account of his remarks. But the warning itself deserves attention, particularly the ease with which something can become familiar without becoming any more acceptable.
There is a troubling possibility here: the resourcefulness that helps people endure can become an excuse for outsiders to stop caring. We admire resilience. Sometimes that admiration allows us to look away from what people are being required to withstand. Their ability to carry on starts doing the moral work that our attention once did.
Yet nobody owes the outside world a permanent display of distress. People should be able to laugh, love, work where they can and take pleasure in whatever remains available, without those moments being recruited as evidence that things cannot be so bad. Requiring visible misery before taking suffering seriously adds another burden to lives already constrained.
The complication is that nobody can sustain equal attention to every injustice. Exhaustion is real, and constant exposure to suffering can leave people feeling that attention itself achieves very little. There is no useful honesty in pretending otherwise.
Still, limited attention need not mean careless judgement. When we read about life under repression, we can resist treating survival as approval. When the subject arises in conversation, we can question the comfortable assumption that a situation which has lasted must somehow have become tolerable.
The passage of time changes what observers notice. It does not, by itself, return any freedom to the person whose choices have been taken away. That person still has to live tomorrow, long after the rest of us have moved on to another story.