“Mentality (noun) [often derogatory]: the characteristic attitude of mind or way of thinking of a person or group.” (The New Oxford Dictionary of English)
________
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 sometimes 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—if any at all—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 is naught but bomb-blast-dismembered body parts.■
[Frank G Sterle Jr]
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