Too ridiculous to be true

I know I am becoming a sceptic but after all the fan-fare of the UK taking in the "children" who were living in the refugee camp at Calais I fully expected to see some of the small children we have become accustomed to see wandering about the camp.

When the bus pulled up and the "children" disembarked, I was surprised  to see fully grown teenagers leaving the bus, no sign of the young children who the "press" have been illustrating as the need for immediate action, softening the public up for us to accept them as quickly as possible.

Has everything become a question of smoking mirrors. Is nothing as it seems. Can we believe in anything we read, or watch on the media or is it all a story line written by a shadowy guiding hand.
We are fallible, increasingly exposed to a cacophony of information, not necessarily from reliable sources (an increasingly difficult concept) but from amateur footage sown together in a ménage of kaleidoscopic images which show the immediacy of the event without giving much perspective. It was always the problem with photography, the shot was a contrived effect, a mixture of exposure and aperture speed with a little, out of focus thrown in for good measure.
The bombed out shots of Aleppo are an example. From the scene more Dresden like each day how can anyone live under such conditions and yet in a few hours of ceasefire people emerge and begin to carry on their lives as normal. The bombed out ruin and disintegration which we see is real but the extent of the devastation must be limited otherwise no one would still be alive.
And so it is with everything.  We are treated to a fantasy world of telescopic lenses, close ups of a specific drama and encouraged to think that its general. We have no way of navigating ourselves through this crazy melange this jumbled mess, this confusion, this hotchpotch of truth and fiction.
For mental survival we begin to look away, we become sceptical, we become agnostic in our deliberation unable to comprehend from our relative security and the democratic assumptions we take for granted that this other world exists.
As the children become young adults and the bomb creators reveal life living amongst them, as the starving continue to procreate adding further misery to their lives is it not all too much, too ridiculous to be actually true.