Seen As Disposable Life
With news-stories’ human subjects’ race and culture dictatingquantity of media coverage of even the poorest of souls,a renowned newsman formulated a startling equationjustly implicating collective humanity’s news-consuming callousness- “A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a busmake less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.”.According to this unjust news-media mentality reasonably deducedfive hundred prolongedly-war-weary Middle Eastern Arabs getting blownto 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 bottomright-hand corner of the newspaper’s last page, the so brief accountinvolving a long-lasting war about which there’s virtually absolutelynothing civil; therefor caught in the warring web are civilians mostunfortunate, most weak, the very most in need of peace and civility..And it’s naught but business as usual in the damned nationswhere such severe suffering almost entirely dominates thefractured structured daily routine of civilian slaughter(plus that of the odd well-armed henchman) mostly by meansof bomb blasts from incendiary explosive devices, rock-fire fragmentsand shell shock readily shared with freshly shredded shrapnel woundsresulting from smart bombs often launched for thestupidest of reasons into crowded markets and grade schools. ….Hence where humane consideration and conduct were unquestionablydue post haste came only few allocated seconds of sound bite — a half minuteif news-media were with extra space or time to spare — and one or twoprinted paragraphs on page twenty-three of Section C. Such newsconsumed in the stable fully developed, fully ‘civilized’ Western worldby heads slowly shaking at the barbarity of ‘those people’ in thatwar-torn strife which has forced tens of thousands of civilians to post-hastegather what’s left of their shattered lives and limbs and flee. ….Thus comes the imminent point at which such meager measurecouple-column-inches coverage reflects the civil Western readers’accumulating apathy towards such dime-a-dozen disaster zonesof the globe, all accompanied by a large yawn; then thesaid readers subconsciously perceive even greater human-life devaluationfrom the miniscule hundreds-dead-yet-again coverage.The immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’..Consequentially 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 worthso much the less than, say, three Englishmen drowning in the Thames. Perhapshad they all been cases of the once-persecuted suddenly persecutingor the once-weak wreaking havoc upon their neighboring indigenousminorities — perhaps then there’d be far more compassionate, moral coverage..The human mind is said to be worth much more than the sum of thehuman body’s parts, though that psyche may somehow seem to be oflesser value if all that’s left are bomb-blast dismembered body parts.
