Restore my humanity!
I’m now certain that the constant exposure to news and information though the ever-growing forms of media has damaged us as much as it has educated us. I’ve learnt loads about animals, mega structures, catching Alaskan crab and modified cars through watching cable TV. I’ve kept my finger on the pulse of the economy and what’s going on in the world through Reuters News, the BBC and The Straits Times. Today, I listened to a news programme that jolted me in a big way. It made me realise how desensitised I have become due to the constant barrage of information.

Do you remember that Israel recently conducted a war against Hamas in Gaza? Probably. Do you remember when it started? Not likely. Do you know how many people died? I’m guessing not. I too can’t remember any of these details either. I remember thinking that its sad that there’s another war in that part of the world. I remember thinking that the war seemed very one-sided as well. But that’s about it.

I had to do a bit of work today that I’d loosely term ‘data management’. i.e. mind numbing work. So I put stuck some ear phones in my ears and decided to listen to the radio played from my phone to make time pass a little faster. I tuned straight into a BBC programme covering the after effects of the recent war. It only took a couple of seconds to latch onto the programme and realise what it was about.

Voice of the journalist – “And in this corner the room, lay the body of xxxxx, her body cut in half. And over here, yyyyy’s head got blown off by the sheer force of the explosion. You can still see some bits of brain stuck on the wall. This is where the children of Dr. zzzzz, a Palestinian, lost all his children. The Israeli army said Hamas militants were spotted in this house and fired a high-tech rocket into the building.”

This was followed by an interview of the said Palestinian doctor whose family had been wiped out from that attack. His voice was filled with extreme sorrow. It was painful to listen him recount the story of him returning home to find his children in pieces.

The journalist goes on to report on other accounts of civilian causalities in Gaza, other families being almost completely wiped out because they all were taking shelter together, of a hospital being evacuated because there was a white phosphorous artillery shell fired by the Israeli army burning in the middle of the street next to it. White phosphorous causes horrific burns that are difficult to heal. I remember reading how an elderly woman was treated for minor injuries caused by white phosphorous. She returned a few days later to the doctor and as those wounds did not heal and had eaten through to the bone. Use of white phosphorous in civilian areas during war is banned by the Geneva Convention. Its use as a smoke screen however, is not. That is how the Israeli army justifies its use.

Anyway, I digress. Listening to these actual accounts of people losing their lives, of a child describing how her relative was holding his son’s body while the brains were spilling out, is extremely disturbing. The hair on my back and arms stood for minutes on end after the programme ended. I then realized how desensitised I have become because of the never-ending barrage of media we expose ourselves to. The description of such news stories by an attractive looking blond woman on CNN, or pictureless pages in the newspaper somehow doesn’t quite convey the message or its impact properly, which is a real shame. Its scary that when I read about the war while it was happening, my only thought was “Hmm…. That’s rather sad.”

That radio programme restored a little bit of sensitivity to me. Its horrible that the rest of the world stood by while these horrible atrocities were committed. Myself included.