Flight MH370 – Discontinued?

It seems that the public interest or, at least, the media interest, in MAS Flight MH370 has waned.

It is, often, no longer on the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen and, in newspapers, it has been despatched to the inner pages if it is mentioned at all.

Of course there are still wild theories surfacing on the pages of ‘Facebook’ and other social media centres but the craze has, for the most part, died down.

We are now refocusing on the ‘crisis’ in the Ukraine and other, more sensational, issues.

The fact is that we have developed a mental numbness to the deaths of the people on board because it is taking too long to find the aeroplane; the whole issue is dragging out past our attention span that needs to be filled with something ‘amazing’ every so often.

So we turn our attention back to ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and the latest episode of ‘Blacklist’—or whatever the new kid on the televisual block happens to be. At least therein lies some entertainment, a sop for our unimaginative minds to soak up while we await death in some form or other.

This is what we are doing. We are waiting for death. We are filling in the time between now and whatever awaits us in the hereafter by attending to vacuous entertainments.

Our brains are inured to pain and suffering to the extent that yesterday’s news and shock-horror stories are just humdrum tales today.

We need constantly topping-up on excitement to keep our nerve endings raw.

Might I just put it past you that between one and a half million and two million people have been killed in Afghanistan? Just Afghanistan. We shall ignore the millions of deaths that are, even now, occurring in the Niger Delta, South Thailand, Burma, Sudan, et al, through anthropogenic causes. We haven’t begun to mention that the Americas also have their problems in this regard.

So that didn’t ‘float your boat’, as it were?

Try this:

“The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012. Almost all the hungry people, 852 million, live in developing countries, representing 15 percent of the population of developing counties. There are 16 million people undernourished in developed countries (FAO 2012).”

Take very careful note of that last sentence and then, having read it and absorbed what it means, you may now hang your head in shame.

Why is this happening? Because we voted in the wrong people into Governments. Because we allow Corporate insensitivity to ride rough-shod over us.

Who cares if people are dying through hunger as long as the shareholders get their extra cent on the dollar!

Are you aware that the nation of Uganda is so rich in its potential agronomy that it is capable of growing enough food to feed all of Africa?

Why doesn’t it? Because tribalism and greed will not allow it. Because the political will to transport the food is not there. Because the people in Uganda are dying of AIDs through a failure to resist their vile traditions and filthy customs so there is nobody remaining to pick the crops.

Ancient traditions and cultures are preventing development Worldwide. Not just in the remote areas of backward countries but in the so-called ‘developed’ countries because people come from these backward places and they drag their revolting practices with them and claim the right to practice them. We do not stop them because that would be ‘Politically Incorrect’!

And so we turn our backs.

Thus the media, who know what our bell curves are for ‘news’ input is like, will shelve the subjects that they realise are ‘going off the boil’.

Am I some sort of rabid socialist? No. I am a human being with a fine regard for the suffering of others.

I am a person with a fine sense of justice.

That sense of justice is sometimes seen by others as a form of cruelty but I stand by my beliefs as I will stand by you for your right to your beliefs.

We fretted about the possible deaths of 239 souls on Flight MH370 for a month.

We are ignoring the millions who face death every day and those who pass on every day.

Because we are at the whim of the media, the governments and the corporations.

One day the ‘Black Box’ and ‘Cockpit Voice recorder’ (CVR) will be found and interest will be revived for a few days; there will be a news report on Somalia and we will sit up and take notice; there will be another outbreak of Ebola somewhere and our eyes will widen with vicarious fear for those in danger—but we will only react for a few minutes while the report is being relayed to us.

Then we will settle back and chuckle at another episode of ‘The Following’.

It is a comedy, right?