Reply #41: Soulless? Really?

[Truth2Tell]

I didn't say I don't care about the victims of the pirates or their family and friends. I do. I also care about the teenager killed in the car accident in my home town last night. And the kids starving 300 miles away from the pirate drama on the Somali coast. And the man dying of AIDS next to them. And on and on. It's about placing the situation in a larger context, not about lack of compassion. There may be a few ways one could try and spin this story into something of grand geo-political significance, testing Obama, etc, but really it's a standard crime/victim play of the kind that takes places thousands of times each day the world over, not an earth shattering event.

We Americans have a tendency to latch on emotionally to whatever drama our TV puts in front of us from minute to minute, yet typically we lack a broader perspective of the ongoing ills of the world. How else could so many of us come to believe that 9-11 was the greatest American tragedy of the last decade when in terms of human suffering it doesn't even really make the top 20? TeeeVee drama, that's how.