Sadly and atrociously, 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 [i.e. our] concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nations.

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

The value of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the prolonged 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 like an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’.

To me, it’s external observers’ reprehensible inhuman(e) devaluation, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, of the daily civilian lives lost in prolongedly devastating war zones or even famines.

.

.

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.

.

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.