Kieran Senior

• Published:May 13th, 2008
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Pages

I’m not sure what it is recently, but the news has been plastered with just death.  Let’s start out with the individual killings in Great Britain.  One boy, 16, killed in broad daylight over something most probably meaningless.  I saw another one in the paper today about a 22 year old being killed in Oxford street (yes, that’s probably the busiest street in the UK).  Then moving onto worldwide disasters.  I’m sure everyone has heard of the Burma cyclone/typhoon that has killed in excess of 22,000 people (if you check the original story, they said only hundreds… oh how the death toll rose).  Then moving onto China’s earthquake which has killed in excess of 12,000.  And finally, the bombings in India that were mentioned tonight on the BBC.

So, in the last 2 weeks or so, we’re looking at a death toll of just over 34,000 just from natural disasters alone.  Is it only me who notices this? Or are people just glancing over the news recently? Because I’m deeply moved by things like this and it heightens my "we live so ignorantly" sense.  I think as Britons we have become so complacent about the going-ons of the rest of the world that we prefer to kick our feet up, drink our cup of earl grey and watch the death tolls rise on the news.  Either that or we switch over to Doctor Who and the likes.

Of course I do understand that we’re unable to help from so far away, and we’d lead an unhelpful life if we were to just give up our jobs and chase the next disaster that happened.