Alexandra Sutton: Bradley Manning, Nigella Lawson and my Mum

This is a super speedy off the cuff blog post about something my Mum said the other day. Groundbreaking stuff! It was a fairly innocuous comment, but it left me with some questions. Whilst flicking through the newspaper, she came across a photo of a pre-divorce Nigella Lawson looking pretty glum. To be fair to Mum, Nigella looked extremely world weary, with a furrowed brow and teary eyes. Then came the comment:

"Oh, look at Nigella's sad face," said Mum.

This would have been a perfectly acceptable comment, were it not for the picture of Bradley Manning on the opposite page. Manning looked haggard, thin, ill even, staring into nowhere and awaiting a predicted sentence of around 136 years. The juxtaposition of the two lives (sensitive work by The Daily Mail, as ever) is almost farcical. Both images arguably depict lives falling apart, but the difference in context is almost unimaginable. A divorce, and a whole life taken away in the name of 'justice'. Despite that, for my Mum, it was Nigella's expression that drew out an expression of sympathy. I was outraged, and spouted an ill-advised holier-than-thou remark about the fact that she seemed to care about something that, to me, wasn't important. I couldn't understand how the sheer tragedy of Manning's story had been bypassed for a gritty paparazzi shot of a celeb.

Once I stopped being so melodramatic, I realised that the whole thing was just an example of the way in which everyone feels sympathy and sadness differently - a relatively simplistic epiphany, really. Mum clearly had much more sympathy, even empathy, with a woman her age having a difficult time over marital or familial issues, not unlike many people my Mum may know, or be friends with. It's nigh on impossible to empathise with someone who is probably going to be in prison for the rest of his life, sentenced with a number of years impossible to complete. The situation almost becomes abstract, so far away from anything the average person normally encounters, and involving systems well beyond my understanding at least. It's reminiscent of Stalin's much quoted words about deaths and statistics. Manning will essentially a death sentence - he has certainly already lost a chunk of his life, but the attachment of a potential 136 years to his charge is almost unimaginable. Many of us will have witnessed a messy divorce, few of us will understand the consequences of the Bradley Manning trial, or the alleged "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" he suffered during his year in solitary confinement.

I feel bad for Nigella, obviously, but I can't really explain what I feel for Bradley Manning. Perhaps I reacted emotively to his image out of a sense of obligation - I've followed the case, I disagree vehemently with his treatment, I feel a strong sense of injustice. However, I think it is more than that. I cannot understand how someone in his position must be feeling, but a photo of anyone in his situation is enough to inspire some educated guesswork - lonely, afraid, tired. We've probably never had cause to feel like Manning does, but any level of basic human empathy Without the context of their stories, both images could easily evoke these emotions, and in the case of me and Mum, they did. I suppose that means it all comes down to what you know, what you believe and what you experience. I'm fairly sure that Mum feels bad about Manning, but she's well within her rights to think of Nigella first, even if I berate her from my high horse for doing so. Sympathy is relative, and empathy unpredictable. And I am still confused by Mum.