Ignorance is Bliss

I've admitted before to generally being tremendously oblivious, but in my defense it's probably due to the fact that I seem to have a severe and occasionally unbearable amount of empathy. I suppose that comes with vivid imagination, the ability to feel things so deeply, because I can so easily and genuinely imagine myself in another's situation if I put my mind to it. Thank Heaven it does take effort or I'd be so constantly filled with pity and remorse that I'd be unable to function. Sometimes it just takes the right words to trigger it, though, and without preamble I'm shot brutally into reality with often painful consequences. I read some words like that today, in a Reuters article about the tsunamis on MSN News:

"My mother, no word! My sisters, brothers, aunt, uncle, grandmother, no word!" yelled a woman at a makeshift morgue in Lhokseumawe, Indonesia. "Where are they? Where are they? I don't know where to start looking."

I'm also somewhat paranoid about natural disasters, and I'm fiercely protective of the people I love. This woman's captured words projected me helplessly into a momentary paralysis imagining how I'd feel if my mother were lost, my sister, grandma, father, and I had no way of knowing whether they lived, no way to find them and no way to help them. I unfortunately can fathom standing in front of a billboard covered in polaroid snapshots of thousands of dead and broken bodies, looking for my family's faces, their hands, arms, hair, ears, knees, praying that I identify no part of anybody. It's a debilitating pain.

Until this article and the pictures in an MSN slideshow I had managed to put thoughts and observations about the disaster into the back of my mind and go about being preoccupied with my own narrow life. Now it's harder to do so. Now I'm wondering if I've been improved or handicapped. How much does it pay to remain sequestered in my safe, rural, simple world? What else am I missing?