Victim hood.

Victim hood is a phenomenon that we hear about all the time these days. Victims of crime are paraded in front of the TV camera or the microphone, the normally steely voice of the announcer is softened, there's even a catch in the voice as soto voice the person being interviewed is encourage to act out and describe their grief. Of course being a victim of anything is a shock to the system. Being fired when least expected, is different to being assaulted but both are victims. Loosing your home to vandals or having it washed away by a tsunami leaves someone being a victim. But are we in this country making a meal out of victim-hood. Perhaps its a way of contrasting the fully functioning life of a person who sails through life and, in stark contrast, the unhappy lot of the victim is projected on our screens as a palliative  . It is assumed that the victim is destroyed by their experience but there are many victims who build their life on the experience and for many the experience is only one of many experiences which the interviewer would find appalling.
Depending on the environment, people experience all kinds of bad things, but the term bad is relative. Loosing your job is common in some parts of society, experiencing violence is common, all are victims but in some places they are the norm and therefore the middle class abhorrence of anything which happens without the will and acceptance of a person is seen outrageous, whilst to others, "that's life". The victim is induced to spill the last gory detail of something which in sections of our diverse population would be filed away as normal, a case of events, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the voyeur in us needs the details, needs to see the tears, needs to hear the anguish even when the event happened many years ago and had been buried under layers of survival conditioning, the person seeing themselves not as a victim but as a member of the human race who has not had the right cards dealt them in the first place.

From the concept of victim-hood, are we not victims of our own self centred focus.
From birth to death we live without a thought of being the victim of death. We assume our plans in the morning have relevance and will,  for the most part be completed but what if the moment I tap in the next full stop, I drop dead, am I a victim of my own optimism,  "that I will, press send".
This rich experience we call life which some would say we squander is always on a knife edge and yet we never acknowledge the fact, that in some ways, much of our activity is trivial since, in this heart beat moment when we are on this earth (a heart beat in the geological time frame) we presuppose that individually we have meaning and relevance.
Of course in our own minds we do. 

Our minds make up who we are, they feed us the 'story line' of our existence but is the 'story line' for real or is it a fiction. If our minds conceptualise what we see and hear, forming patterns which fit our desires, does the stuff we exclude, like the waste from the supermarket have little or no value. The person brought up in a Palace will have very different  assumptions as to their worth than the chap growing up in a Favela. The conditioning swells or diminishes his perception and his life is made what it is, not only by the economic variance but the mental state that the variance brings. 

We are all trapped in our own mind which itself is trapped in our own experiences. This leads one to conclude there is no real commonality between us, we are all alone. It is a great fiction to believe that life is, or has a format which can be meaningfully evaluated and discussed, other than by ourselves. From our own unique perspective, only death unites us.