What is the point of losing jobs and profits for the sake of protesting about the death of a relatively unknown journalist. People all over the globe are being killed as I write, it's the way of the world and it seems hypocritical that we choose the one and ignore the others.
Of course we are children of the media and when the media is mocked by an assassination of its own the news wires are hot with condemnation and we who are plugged into the news flow for our daily diet of human drama, we react as programmed.
Death on the streets of Alexander Township or the streets of Aleppo are so commonplace that apart from a police report or a body count no one bothers. We define ourselves by the way we react to tragedy but in itself how we define tragedy describes us more fully. It used to be the case where death in a foreign country was a foreign affair and nothing for us to worry about, but the internet has made a mockery of what foreign means these days and as the smart phone becomes the tool by which all events are now brought to us and is itself in the hands of half the worlds population, it means that we are sated with news.
Our attitude to these foreign events has to take into account our understanding of the society we are looking at. People who die are categorised by their ethnicity, religion and their social standing. Death is closer to the poor and we often take the death of a poor peasant with a pinch of salt whilst the death of a celebrity, a mover and shaker, is strung up for all to see.
Our inability to make the connection between a Saudi Arabian Journalist and the people starving in Yemen says more about us than we would care to reveal.
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