equality is relative

the news is depressing, as usual.

a ship capsizes in the north sea - 5 drown, one of them is a 14 year old boy

someone else pulls a Jeremy (apologies to Eddie Vedder) in Virginia - 33 die, including an Indian born professor

The names of the aforesaid boy and the professor are available in news reports, including comments and statements from friends and relatives.

The global response has been overwhelming - especially regarding the latter, which has been described as the worst of its kind in American history. Heads of State from around the world have expressed their shock and horror and sent their condolences. Understandably, people have found it hard to come to terms with the sudden and traumatic extinction of young vibrant lives.

Amidst all this, something at the back of my mind bothers me. There is a sense of unrest and strangely, injustice. I have to work my way through this moral maze, so bear with me.

A few days ago, on the Today programme on Radio 4, John Humphrys was at his incisive best. He was interviewing a Red Cross official from Iraq. The Red Cross had issued a press statement saying that the people of Iraq now find life 'unbearable'.
John Humphrys pounced on this: 'What is so unbearable in Iraq now?' he asked the official.

That question stopped me. Now what would be so unbearable, I wondered. The suicide bombs? but surely, we are all 'used' to this by now (even if Iraqis are not); the abject poverty, hunger and illness? but again, that is old news; the kidnapping and slaughter of civilians? but the western media do not even waste their precious air time on such 'ordinary' reports these days (when the recent suicide bomb killed 3 MPs in the Iraqi parliament, the BBC correspondent said that this was being reported only because it occured within the Green Zone maintained by US forces).

This was the Red Cross official's reply to John Humphrys' query (quoted from memory)
'We met some women in the streets of Baghdad. When we asked them what they find unbearable, they did not say anything at all. When we persisted, asking them what is the ONE thing they would like to improve about their living conditions, what is the ONE thing that they find most unbearable about their lives, they reluctantly said: can you clear away the dead bodies that pile up in front of our doors? it is unbearable to see our children traumatised by the sight of dismembered bodies every day when they go to school'

I cannot remember the rest of the conversation. All I could think of was my childhood in India: schoolday mornings when I went through phases of sleepiness, laziness, hunger, more sleepiness, reluctance and finally panic as my mother pushed me off to the bus stop, with the warmth of my lunchbox seeping through my schoolbag. The only trauma I had been exposed to was one of the other boys splashing some mud on my crisp white shirt - and yet, I was so reluctant to go to school. What would I have done if I had to face up to faceless bodies and orphaned limbs in my courtyard everyday?

Which brings me to my initial reaction:
'What could be unbearable to Iraqis these days?'
Surely, the answer should be simple, as humans we would all feel the same things unbearable: extremes of pain, bereavement, anxiety, hunger, thirst, fear.
Why do we assume that people living in constant pain, in constant hunger, in constant fear - somehow tolerate these unbearable things more?

Reminds me of something I read recently, by James Meek: people less fortunate than us do not get used to their misfortune, they just learn how not to show it.

Can I imagine for a minute, the pain and the suffering that people internalise, just to keep their families together, just so that they can have a superficial layer of normality in their lives? Do I want to imagine? Do I have the strength of character to empathise?

In the closing scenes of 'A Time to Kill', Matthew McConnaughey asks the jury to close their eyes, as he describes the rape of a black girl in the bad old days in Mississippi. In the end, moved to tears, he pleads to the predominantly white jury: 'for a moment, imagine she is white...'
The director has captured the response of the jury to these words beautifully. He shows exactly how something viewed with clinical detachment suddenly gets painfully and unpredictably close to one's soul.

Maybe that is what we should do, bring the pain of others dangerously close to our soul - and see if it burns us.

Neil Gaiman says in his multi-award winning 'American Gods' that our insular nature protects us from the world. We see crying mothers and dying children on TV all the time, but we build fences around our souls so that we are not scarred by the heat of their pain.

The media helps us here. When 150 people die in Iraq, we do not hear of Mukhaibir al-Alwani or Sazane Ismail Abdullah among the dead, we just hear a number - 150 dead. Humanity is sqeezed, like matchsticks, into a number our narrow minds can handle. (I came across these names on this website: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/names.php)

The same is true of the children who die before the age of one in Somalia. Official figures quote 4,000,000 deaths in infancy. Would it help us to know that Xareed Duubi Deero and Diiriye Dalal Faahiye were among the dead? Maybe it would be too painful to imagine that the 'the sunken-eyed skull-on-sticks attached to a protruding, disease-ridden abdomen' on TV has a name, an individuality, a capacity to love and cry and eat, an awareness of life and his own mortality.

So we switch our souls off, insulate (the etymology is obvious here) ourselves and spend our money on the bigger, better plasma TV and 'dog bling' for our pooches.

Yes. We know the names of the 14 year old Norwegian and the 50 year old Indian professor. The media wants us to know, because somehow, it is more important to know who they were, than the thousands who died elsewhere.

I guess equality is relative, even in death