We the Viewers of the United States

During my interaction with virtual reality, I couldn’t help but feel distanced from what I was viewing. It was as if I was watching a movie--merely seeing images move across the screen while sounds played in the background for added effect. Every time I adjusted my headset or turned up the volume to drown out my surroundings, I was reminded that my experience was only temporary. My brain responded to this impermanence by classifying the virtual reality as a form of entertainment. Rather than connecting to the deep emotions of the migrant experience, we, viewers, tend to perceive the obliterated buildings and pained faces as features of a story, a privilege that we can enjoy because such realities are not are our own.

While watching the daily life of a migrant in “The Displaced,” I felt this strong urge to reach out and touch something. Hearing and seeing alone weren’t enough to take me beyond a basic movie-watching experience. I needed to feel something, whether it was the physical pieces of rubble strewn across the ground or the emotion of the young boy as he contemplated a slow versus fast death. I heard the birds, I saw the grass, but, still, I felt nothing, besides an expected level of interest. After the eleven-minute video finished, I removed my headset and switched off the screen. An immediate sense of guilt shot through my body as I realized that I escaped my reality by watching someone else’s inescapable reality.

This guilt quickly transformed into a comparison of my lifestyle to that of the migrants. The clear pattern of "I have more, they have less" comfortability, safety, education, and resources reinforces the barrier between viewers and migrants, thus making us further and further from achieving empathy. By viewing the migrants as having less than, we subconsciously define them as being less than. This mindset grossly discounts the true strength of migrants and perpetuates their otherization.