"It's a terrible thing wishing that it can be someone else's tragedy"

The line exposes a cruel reflex at the edge of fear: when suffering looms, the mind searches for a scapegoat, a body to carry the blow we dread. The wish is not merely to be spared; it is to displace pain onto someone else. That pivot from self-preservation to substitution is what makes it terrible. It trades empathy for survival advantage, turning another person’s life into a buffer for our own.

There is a difference between hoping for safety and hoping that danger finds another target. The first is a plea for mercy; the second is a calculus that assumes suffering must be paid by someone. Behind it is a zero-sum imagination of the world, trained by scarcity and sharpened by systems that force grim choices: layoffs that must hit some household, hospital beds rationed during a crisis, lotteries of conscription or selection. Such structures entice us into complicity, inviting the quiet thought, Let it not be me, let it be them.

That thought corrodes solidarity. It treats other people’s pain as an instrument, and in doing so narrows our sense of the human. Even when it arises from panic rather than malice, it leaves a residue of shame, a recognition that survival achieved by exporting harm is a thin victory. It also invites a cycle of mutual othering: once pain becomes a commodity to be offloaded, communities fracture, and fear circulates with renewed force.

The line also points to a subtler betrayal: wishing tragedy elsewhere blinds us to the shared project of prevention. Energy that could build safer structures becomes energy spent finding a different target. Compassion demands a wider imagination, one that refuses the premise that tragedy requires a substitute, insisting instead on reducing the total sum of harm.

To confront that wish is to reclaim moral agency. We may not master every reflex in moments of threat, but we can name the temptation, resist the bargain it offers, and choose to be the kind of people who refuse to outsource suffering.