The Dead

It seems more likely that everyday there will be reports in the news media of another mass slaughter by some deranged gun totting folks or some infrastructure failure or mother earth not liking some beach front or offshore drilling. Locals will try to capture the disaster on their phones posting videos on the social media before a professed qualified and trained journalist can show up to get a body count. 

 

We, as a society, seem to have a fanatic want to see the faces of the deceased. Their profile just increases the agony and pain of those lost too early. Even if we never heard of the person(s) we will hold vigils and burn candles and make messages of how we grieve for strangers. 

 

Publishing the faces seems to bring closure to the event and allows us to move on.

We seem to be obsessed with displaying the corpse. In the ole West, when a bandit or scalawag was killed, the town would display the bodies like some hunter’s trophy display on the wall. Morticians and churches feed off the deceased with carting out the body for all to view and tell stories over. It is OK because they are not listening.

Then we put the dearly departed in a hole and it becomes a lonely place lined up with others who had reached the end of the line. 

 

The question is: What about the wounded?

 

Yes the grieving families will mourn for their lose, but there are other families who must also adjust their lives for the disruption and suffering and cost of the wounded. The injured yet surviving the occasion may have a brief moment to tell the experience first hand, but will fade into oblivion while still faced with years of pain and therapy dragging their family and friends to new assessments of relationships.

Maybe there is not enough paper to print or fileserver space to store all the faces. The journalists only have a deadline before the next event takes the headlines as it has done today.