Living, breathing and greatly suffering people on this atrocity-prone planet often are [consciously or subconsciously] perceived as not being of equal value or worth to everyone else, when morally they all definitely should be. And it’s not hard for a conscience to do when one considers another an innately lower life form.
Sadly and atrociously, human beings – very much including children – 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/or perishes; 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’.
A somewhat similar reprehensible inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in prolongedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken nations.
Meanwhile, with each daily news report of the 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.
Indeed, it’s sadly and even shamefully true that while some peoples have been brutally victimized throughout history a disproportionately large number of times, the victims of one place and time can and sometimes do become the victimizers of another place and time.
