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; therefor 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’. . 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 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 compassionate, moral 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.
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