(August 27, 2015 at 6:45 am)abaris Wrote: I care when I'm confronted with the victims, with their unfinished lives and what they have left behind. That hardly happens in these shootings. The media focusses on the shooter and the victims become numbers. It's hard to identify with numbers or to care about numbers.
More recently this happened with the black church massacre and I'm even hard pressed to remember the town where it happened. You got to know next to nothing about the people being killed. Focus on the shooter, his background and his picture with the racist stickers all over his clothing and his car.
Distance and frequency play a part too. The same as when you hear 'a bomb has gone off in Iraq, many dead', this happens thousands of miles away, in a different culture and fairly often. To be deeply moved about strangers I usually have to be somewhat surprised. In these cases I only have grim acceptance.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. ~ George Bernard Shaw
