In this season of love, caring can seem especially distant. Let’s rebuild bonds.

With Valentine’s Day approaching, it seems appropriate to write something from the heart, even if I am feeling a bit heartbroken right now. The last few days have been heavy. A natural disaster has killed more than 20,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless across Syria and neighboring Turkey. The death toll continues to rise.

A friend in Kansas City recently discovered that his grandfather was one of the 20,000. His family has lost six relatives so far. Yesterday, another friend from the East Coast lost four cousins and their entire family in Turkey. A text from a friend informed me that her cousin’s body was just recovered from the rubble in Syria, and her husband is still unaccounted for.

You would think that an earthquake of this magnitude would shake up the human conscience, but the authoritarian ruling elites in the region have doubled down on the notion that the quake was solely responsible for all the devastation. Rather than admit that their delayed rescue efforts and poorly constructed buildings may have contributed to the tragedy, they decided to ban Twitter.

In so many regions of the world, infrastructure is nothing more than a symbol of progress. Real progress remains elusive.

But these recent developments have made me reflect on the ways that human beings react to tragedy. It’s never really the statistics that determine the magnitude of a crisis. Twenty thousand dead in less than a week does not warrant the same amount of media real estate as, say, five, 10, or just one death under other circumstances. Context is everything. There is something about an act of God versus an act of man that invokes vastly differing responses.

When we have a man-made disaster, we denounce mankind. We react, sometimes violently. When we have a natural disaster, we do not denounce God, we find him.

The thoughts and prayers have been flowing. The power of prayer is real, says my friend from Turkey. Of course, it is. Just knowing that someone is holding you through prayer is powerful enough to keep you from imploding.

There is no shortage of pain in the world today. Turkey, Syria, Ukraine, the Uyghurs in China.

People are suffering in unimaginable ways. One might argue that pain is pain, emotional or physical. It makes no difference to the person who is experiencing it where they live or what circumstances they find themselves under.

But I believe physical pain is the worst. Emotional pain has the infinite space of a neuroplastic mind in which to hide. It allows for coping mechanisms like denial and delusion. We can mythologize and craft narratives of personal or societal triumph and meaning to deal with emotional pain.

Physical pain, like hunger, thirst, and frostbitten limbs from freezing weather, has nowhere to go but the four corners of our body. Emotional pain can radicalize us, but physical pain will paralyze us.

Witnessing the pain of others has shaken up my conscience and motivated me to develop new narratives to heal our collective pain. It has inspired me to develop an attitude of gratitude, not grievance.

Grievance mongers are always trying to upset us over the nonissues of life. Rather than helping us to rebuild our own communal infrastructure, they sow dissent and manufacture chaos within communities and between neighbors. Like their authoritarian counterparts in other parts of the world, they build their political profiles by invoking panic, which usually means spreading conspiracies of one kind or another.

The reality is that we do need to rebuild our own infrastructure in the form of abstract institutions like family, as well as concrete ones like parks and schools and buildings that house programs that support our elderly, our disabled, and our children. Our young people, especially, desperately need islands of stability to grow up to become well-adjusted adults who can deal with natural and manmade disasters both.

Our institutions may be flawed, and our metaphorical political guardrails rusted, the road ahead is full of potholes for sure. These were never built as just symbols of progress, though. They are indications of actual progress. They are real, and like all things that are real, they require the usual routine and regular maintenance.

Maybe if we viewed the tensions of modern life, the unraveling of social norms, and the rapidly changing landscape of our technologically isolating world as a natural disaster instead of a nefarious plot by the opposing party, we could start addressing our problems logically and with reason instead of rage.

In this season of love, I hope we can craft new social narratives, which like all such narratives, must always rely on a little ancient wisdom.

Stoic and ancient philosopher Seneca offers us this healing prayer. I hope it serves as a start.

Inas Younis was born in Mosul, Iraq, and emigrated to the United States as a child. She is a writer and commentator who has been widely published in various magazines, websites and anthologies. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.