Suffering isn’t a competition: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere
Suffering isn’t a competition: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere
by Jared O. Bell
The start of 2026 arrives less as a new beginning and more as the potent aftershocks of the many earthquakes we endured in 2025. It was a year defined by widening wars, democratic backsliding, the systematic hollowing out of governmental, diplomatic, and humanitarian institutions, tariff-driven economic uncertainty, and the normalization of political violence in the United States and around the world.
Heading into the second week of January, the news cycle has only grown heavier and faster than most of us anticipated. We have witnessed the forcible removal of Venezuela’s dictator under circumstances that appear to violate core principles of international law; the killing of Renée Good, a U.S. citizen, during an ICE operation in Minneapolis, Minnesota; renewed rhetoric suggesting territorial or military escalation involving Greenland; and what increasingly resembles a revolutionary moment taking shape in Iran. All of this unfolds against the backdrop of ongoing conflicts in Sudan and Ukraine, wars that continue to grind on with limited resolution, uneven attention, and devastating human cost.
Amid this convergence of crises, another pattern has become impossible to ignore, particularly across social media: the rise of false equivalencies, whataboutism, and competing narratives that demand suffering be ranked, compared, or morally audited, rather than seen plainly as injustice and harm. This dynamic is not new. But in recent days, it has been especially visible in reactions, or the perceived lack thereof, to the unfolding revolution in Iran when contrasted with the massive global mobilization around Gaza.
I’ve noticed this same dynamic in responses to the Trump administration’s removal of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, where public discourse collapsed into a false choice: either condemning the action as illegal or justifying it because Maduro was a brutal dictator. In reality, both can be true. Acknowledging one injustice does not require excusing another. Holding these truths together is not moral confusion. It is moral clarity.
I’ll also be the first to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that not all lives receive the same attention or urgency from global media or policymakers. This is precisely the context in which the Black Lives Matter slogan emerged. Despite frequent mischaracterizations and criticism, its core message was never that only Black lives matter, but that Black lives matter too. Selective empathy is real; it is a structural feature of global politics and media ecosystems.
People tend to engage most deeply with crises that intersect with their identities, interests, political commitments, or moral frameworks. At the same time, it is both necessary and appropriate to call out moments of moral exclusion, when certain lives or struggles are implicitly deemed less worthy of concern, visibility, or protection.
We also need to be honest about the limits of human attention and endurance. Compassion fatigue is real for many of us. Each of us has a finite emotional and cognitive capacity to absorb a constant barrage of global crises and human suffering. Some people are moved to action; others disengage from the news entirely; still others feel overwhelmed and shut down. These responses are human, not moral failures. We all navigate chaos differently.
The tension emerges not from our human limits themselves, but from how they are misused or perceived. Fatigue is turned into a reason to dismiss others, feeling overwhelmed becomes a way to minimize someone else’s pain, and caring deeply about one injustice is treated as proof that you must not care about another, or that you are somehow being hypocritical. Not everyone can, or will, be equally engaged with every injustice, and that is simply a fact of human life. Recognizing our limits should deepen humility and empathy, not be used to rank suffering or withdraw solidarity.
This distinction becomes especially important when we consider how global crises are interpreted and compared. What happened in Gaza was horrific: thousands killed, starved, and bombed. Acknowledging that reality does not negate, or even diminish, what has unfolded in Iran. Information from inside the country has arrived sporadically precisely because the regime has blocked communications, shut down internet access, and responded to protests with lethal force, killing hundreds of demonstrators.
Recognizing our limits should deepen humility and empathy, not turn suffering into a contest. Some will step forward where others cannot, and others will step back when they must. Neither requires permission.
There can be more than one injustice in the world that we care about. In that spirit, it is worth recalling the enduring truth articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” If that principle still means anything, then we must reject the impulse to rank suffering or create competitions of victimization.
Repression and human rights violations, and the movements that challenge them, share a common pursuit of human rights, justice, and dignity. That principle applies to those protesting the killing of Renée Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, to those demanding accountability for Gaza, to those marching in Iran against an oppressive regime, and to those advocating on behalf of Sudan or wherever oppression persists. These are not competing commitments. They are different expressions of the same moral impulse.
We no longer need legacy media, governments, or civil society to serve as gatekeepers, to broadcast our concerns or to validate which injustices deserve attention. The tools to inform, organize, and mobilize are already in our hands. What remains is the willingness to use them, without waiting for perfect conditions, perfect consensus, or permission from anyone else.
Suffering does not need competition. Justice is not a finite resource. And our responsibility, to see clearly, to care broadly, and to act, belongs to each of us.
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Jared O. Bell, PhD, syndicated with PeaceVoice, is a former U.S. diplomat and scholar of human rights and transitional justice, dedicated to advancing global equity and systemic reform.
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