EDITORIAL - A million Connecticuts daily

It is not the intention of this piece to denigrate the horror that was the Connecticut massacre, in which 20 children, aged six to seven, were among the innocent victims of a mad man armed with two handguns and an assault rifle. That incident diminishes us all.

But there are other horrors slowly snuffing out the lives of even younger children in other parts of the world even now as you read this. It is also neither the purpose of this piece to make comparisons, still these other children need your attention too.

That the children in Connecticut were brutally killed should not in any way make less gut-wrenching the slow deaths suffered by even more numerous youngsters elsewhere due to poverty, hunger and disease.

The only difference is that the killings happened in the United States of America, where everything is free and easy and no such horrors are supposed to happen, while the walking dead eke out their miserable living in the parched earths of the Third World.

Yet it is a difference made stark in the reporting done largely by the western press, whose coverage of Connecticut was relentless. You do not see the same sweeping coverage by the press on Africa’s children.

The meaningless lives of Africa’s suffering children are simple footnotes in the tragic side of the human story, human interest tales given airtime more to satisfy curiosity than spark genuine concern.

The bloated bodies that surface after each monsoon flood in Bangladesh, the continued homelessness in Haiti after Nature punished that country, the gunning down of  schoolgirls in the Philippines for their cheap cellphones.

These are all human stories that are no less tragic than Connecticut. Indeed, they are far more horrific in that they happen everyday matter of factly. If it is any consolation, which it is not, at least Sandy Hook may never happen again.

But outside America’s shores, far beyond what the inward-looking western press would allow their eyes to see with greater depth and clarity, a thousand, nay, a million Connecticuts are happening everyday. Only that the suffering comes in God’s myriad mysterious ways.