The unmarked dead, and thoughts from the back line of human pain.

It has seemed to me for a while that there is no-one that stands up for our charnelled dead. I doubt they ever wanted to be dead. I doubt they would have ever seen themselves as a political statement, red in tooth, blood type and flat line. Their voices, their ideas are largely subsumed by the political actor in the play, the man with the bomb, the woman with the commitment, the other side.

For killing us, we are just the convenient punch bags for publicity. We try to remember the people that died in Oklahoma, or Mumbai or London or now Oslo and we can't.

We cannot see the victims as more important than the message. All these messages that these people share with us, via blood and death? Why are they more important that the telegram:

Dear Mrs Ali,

Private Ali has not returned from an expeditionary force tasked with approaching the borders os Afghanistan.

You have my regrets. 

Would they want us to be impressed that their deaths were to be allowed, trapped by the horror that was done to them, into what?

An idea?

What?   

Folk that cry out at the evil that men do, simply justify the evil that men do. It is kind of important that we are not  cowed by the wolf, or the fox or whatever other scary creature we encounter.

It was wrong to pander to the spectacular, the deliberate assault  on  the fairly transparent idea that you and I should live on this fucked up planet until we leave it as something better than the victims of an advertising campaign for the mad, the bad and the completely insane. Which, it seems to me, is what an aweful lot of us basic humans do.

Ho hum.