• FrankGSterleJr
    94
    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.
  • LuckyR
    501
    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’.


    First, it is an error to use First World newspaper coverage as the measure of importance or human caring. Are Third World media carrying these stories in significantly higher volume?
  • Tom Storm
    9.1k
    Meanwhile, with each news report of the daily death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation.FrankGSterleJr

    Isn't it conventional wisdom that this is the case and that culture has increasingly desensitised us to the suffering of others? And not just via armed conflict, but also the war on poverty in our own cities wrought by neoliberal economic policies which hollow out community life and redefine citizenship in terms of the market and how well you are doing economically.

    But what of it? What does it mean and what are the proposed solutions?

    There are plenty of first world casualties being overlooked right here where we live, thanks to multifarious barbarisms on Main Street.
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