There's enough room in our hearts for more than one tragedy

Any time an issue is raised, there is always someone saying, "Yeah, but what about ..." It seems that you just cannot make a statement without somebody suggesting something unrelated is more important, more worthy of attention, or of more value - as if we don't have the capacity to hold space for, attend to, or value more than one thing at a time.

Lately, it feels like this tendency has gone to the next level.

To the shock of the cricketing world, Shane Warne died last week, and his family was offered a state funeral. But someone on Twitter wanted to know "What about Julian Assange?"

I'm not sure where she was going with this, as he's very much alive and thus not exactly a candidate for a state funeral. But there it was: "Yeah, but what about ..."

With the Russo-Ukraine war, there are people literally taking the opportunity to suggest that pronoun preferences aren't so important now, are they? One of our very own federal PMs made this unrelated connection on Twitter, and I'm still shaking my head as to how he linked these two completely disparate things, and somehow managed to create a "Yeah, but what about ..." moment out of it.

Perhaps one of the most common examples is when posts about gendered violence experienced by women are responded to with 'Yeah, but what about the abuse women perpetrate?"

Do we really need to choose between Shane Warne's state funeral and wanting to support Julian Assange? Do we really have to forget about calling people by their identifying pronouns in the wake of the war in Ukraine? Does mention of the violence experienced by women really need to be cancelled out by mentioning abuse perpetrated by them? Can we not hold different conversations about different things and attribute value to each discussion?

It seems ridiculous when framed like this (although in my opinion, it seems ridiculous no matter how it's framed), and yet it is one of the most common responses to issues like these.

I think the reaction stems from a perceived idea of some sort of unwritten hierarchy of importance. The conflict in Ukraine is considered more important than someone else's pronouns by the MP who posted about it, and thus he saw an opportunity to try and point out how "unimportant" pronouns "really are" - despite pronouns being significantly important to a large number of other people, and completely unrelated to the conflict referenced. No longer calling people by their preferred pronouns makes zero difference to the war being waged - it's simply another opportunity being taken to undermine the acceptance of and support for others with different lived experiences.

In other words, the "Yeah, but what about ..." argument is a power play. It is deliberately used to undermine the value of another and render them "unimportant" within the context provided, regardless of the relevancy of the given context.

But here's the thing - it isn't an either/or scenario. Shane Warne's state funeral can go ahead, and we can still passionately advocate for (the very much alive) Julian Assange. We can provide support to those affected by the Russo-Ukraine war, while still using the correct pronouns for those around us. We can support women who have experienced gendered violence, while still holding those women who abuse others to account.

We don't need to choose.

It's easy to forget this when we are often confronted by unequal (and unrelated) battles of importance and value through our politicians and our media. When big newspapers attribute extensive column inches across multiple pages to Shane Warne - pushing news about the floods and the seeming development of World War III out the way to do it - it feels like we, as a society, are saying nothing matters more than this one story.

We need balance, and we need to recognise that multiple important things can happen simultaneously. One doesn't cancel out the other. We can grieve for Warney, the Ukrainian people and flood-affected Australians all with the same heart.