Dear Editor,

All lives and needless suffering should matter. But that’s much easier for a conscience to dismiss when one considers another an innately much lower life form.

On a mindbogglingly massive scale, human beings are being seen and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic, relatively civilised and supposedly Christian nations.

A somewhat similar reprehensible inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, towards the daily civilian lives lost in prolonged war zones and famine-stricken regions.

In other words, the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers, and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. It’s an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’. And it’s even easier for a conscience to do when one considers another an innately lower life form.

With each news report of the daily civilian death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitisation and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally since I began regularly consuming news products in the late 1980s.

Frank Sterle Jr

fgsjr2013@gmail.com