Violence and humanity. Some are more important than others?

There is not a day when there is no violent act anywhere on the planet.  Humans being humans we kill and rape and do things that many of us might not even be able to imagine.

As atrocious and horrible those incidents are, I suspect we never get to hear and read about most of them because they just don't get reported.  Or, if they do show up in the news, it might be geographically restricted.  And then there are some that get global coverage.

Almost always, the tragedies that strike the poor countries get very little coverage compared to events in rich countries.  Here too we display that human trait, I suppose, in being a lot more fascinated with the lifestyles of the rich and famous while condemning to anonymity the poor and the disadvantaged.

The Boston violence was an awful act.  Horrible and senseless violence.  I certainly would like to torture the life out of the crappy humans who carried that out.

But, even within the US, we have witnessed a lot of violence.  The killing of children and adults at a school in Connecticut.  The killings at a Gurudwara.  The movie theater killings.  The reactions to each of these events seem to be very different.  It is almost as if we have some kind of a metric that guides the media, social, and political responses to the killings.

Now, all those are within the US.  Meanwhile, bloody violence happens on a daily basis all around the world--a lot more in some countries than in others.  In Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq or Congo or ... the magnitude of violence against civilians is a lot more, and on a daily basis.  Most of those don't even blip in our radars.  And even if they do, they don't stay on the radars for long.

The violence itself depresses me.  As one who even prefers to avoid verbal conflicts, and as one who doesn't even like the idea of water pistols, I literally feel weakened when I watch the blood and gore of the violence. I force myself, sometimes, to read and watch news items about them because I tell myself that I can't simply close my eyes and wish them away.  I owe it to my fellow humans to understand such suffering.  And, of course, I need to do this so that I can be a better educator.

On top of the violence that depresses me, I find it terrible that a human life is not the same anywhere on the planet.  There seems to be a collective ennui when it comes to the loss of the lives of humans who were doing nothing but tending to their daily lives in some parts of the world.  The innocent civilians who die by the hundreds and thousands in many, many countries of the world do not make it even to the back pages of the papers, leave alone the front pages.

A strange interpretation of "what it is to be human" that we walk around with when we do not pay attention to, for instance, the following from recent days:

• An explosion in Pakistan has killed at least 16 people and wounded dozens more
• Blast in Bangalore injures 16
• Meanwhile, at least 35 dead and more than 150 injured as a result of an earthquake in Pakistan
• And last Sunday was that horrific attack in Mogadishu
• The civil war in Syria rages on ... 

A human's life in one part of the world is not the same as a human's life in another part of the world?  How can that be!  As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice:

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that

Well, here is to hoping for peace on the planet.  Everywhere on the planet.