How do we analyse this story, what sort of people enter a school to savagely mow down the children, how do we understand an outburst of revenge by the men who strapped explosives onto themselves and shot the kids indiscriminately.
This attack is in response to the brutality of the Pakistani Army over the proceeding months against villages in the area where the Taliban were operating. Brutality, whereby the Army would wipe out a whole village, men, women and children, a violent example of undiluted power where there is no sense of, even limited moral perspective.
Man, from Genghis Khan through to Stalin and Hitler have perpetrated massacre on an industrial scale. Today we report on anything and everything but in those years, it took 'defeat' for the story to come out for the general public to read about, in fact, in the Russian case the leaders of the West sat on stories coming out of Russia because Russia was an ally !
This doesn't make the horror we should feel any the less but listening to the Aussies building their own limited death toll into a national disaster one has to say, get a grip !
We do it here, we raise the gate of grief (some of it manufactured) like a tidal water barrier to wash away our immediate concerns and focus on the tragedy of others to obscure the actual causes of general discontent.
Death in some countries is a handshake away, death is something they expect throughout their lives. Infant mortality in places like The Sudan, death by violence in the suburbs of Bogotá, suicide bombings in Iraq.
It's all in the general grist of life and death which we, living a cosy secure existence can have no comprehension and yet we write and read about it as if we knew or even partially understood what life is really like for the vast majority of human beings on this planet.
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