creating an image, a new regime, perhaps?

`
Don't ask to compare tragedies, don't ask me for a death toll either. Don't ask for categories that have numbers fitting together like sections of an antique cabinet. Let the fin-de-siecle fuels run beneath this road... let prices rise, flood waters? I'm thinking of New Orleans now, of tsunamis past and devastating, I'm thinking I couldn't outrun any of them **wink** **groan, Irving, Julio ** So what do we regard as our immunity to suffering? Is the greater good (as some would call it) offset by the greater "bad"? What I mean is, does it matter how many people are affected by a certain event? Any loss of life, I believe, is a tragedy, any disappearance of a child, even that isn't on the front page of a newspaper, is distressing too... so what good is the hyperbolic media notion that leads every story with "... the death toll is climbing..." Is that really all that we want to know? Wasn't the tsunami bad enough when "only" 15,000 people had died...

Hmmmmm.... I think this subject is too morbid, these images too. What regime, I wonder, could I create that wouldn't have to breathe off this strangulated sensationalism... Perhaps I'm living too far away from everything... I'm too distant from any tragedy, and maybe if anything like this happened to me I would want the world to know I didn't die without counting.