Living, breathing and greatly suffering people on this atrocity-prone planet are [consciously or subconsciously] perceived as not being of equal value or worth to everyone else, when morally they all definitely should be.

Human beings can actually be seen and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nations.

In other words, the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers; and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. It’s an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’.

Meanwhile, with each news report of the daily death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally since I began regularly consuming news products in 1987.


With news-stories’ human subjects’ race and culture dictating
quantity of media coverage of even the poorest of souls,
a renowned newsman formulated a startling equation
justly implicating collective humanity’s news-consuming callousness
— “A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a bus
make less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.”

According to this unjust news-media mentality reasonably deduced
five hundred prolongedly-war-weary Middle Eastern Arabs getting blown
to bits in the same day perhaps should take up even less space and airtime.

So readily learned is the tiny token short story buried in the bottom
right-hand corner of the newspaper’s last page, the so brief account
involving a long-lasting war about which there’s virtually absolutely
nothing civil; therefore caught in the warring web are civilians most
unfortunate, most weak, the very most in need of peace and civility.

And it’s naught but business as usual in the damned nations
where such severe suffering almost entirely dominates the
fractured structured daily routine of civilian slaughter
(plus that of the odd well-armed henchman) mostly by means
of bomb blasts from incendiary explosive devices, rock-fire fragments
and shell shock readily shared with freshly shredded shrapnel wounds
resulting from smart bombs often launched for the
stupidest of reasons into crowded markets and grade schools. …

Hence where humane consideration and conduct were unquestionably
due post haste came only few allocated seconds of sound bite — a half minute
if news-media were with extra space or time to spare — and one or two
printed paragraphs on page twenty-three of Section C. Such news
consumed in the stable fully developed, fully ‘civilized’ Western world
by heads slowly shaking at the barbarity of ‘those people’ in that
war-torn strife which has forced tens of thousands of civilians to post-haste
gather what’s left of their shattered lives and limbs and flee. …

Thus comes the imminent point at which such meager measure
couple-column-inches coverage reflects the civil Western readers’
accumulating apathy towards such dime-a-dozen disaster zones
of the globe, all accompanied by a large yawn; then the
said readers subconsciously perceive even greater human-life devaluation
from the miniscule hundreds-dead-yet-again coverage.

… The immoral consideration of quality of life.

Consequently continues the self-perpetuation of the token-two-column-inch
(non)coverage as the coldly calculated worth of such common mass slaughter,
ergo those many-score violently lost human lives are somehow worth
so much the less than, say, three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.

Perhaps had they all been cases of the once-persecuted suddenly
persecuting or the once-weak wreaking havoc upon their neighboring indigenous
minorities — perhaps then there’d be far more compassionately just coverage?

The human mind is said to be worth much more than the sum of the
human body’s parts, though that psyche may somehow seem to be of
lesser value if all that’s left are bomb-blast dismembered body parts.