My heart breaks

I have just learned of the alleged murder of the young Jordanian pilot and in the most heinous way. Social media is awash with photos of the poor man being burned alive while trapped in a cage. I am heartbroken and I did not even know him. What sort of people are we that we want to be voyeurs and feel a sadistic pleasure in watching a man die? What have we as human beings become. There is nothing human about us anymore. Worse than savages- thousands of years of civilisation through language and literature and art and this is humanity now. I often criticise our love and worship of celebrities and here is the proof you need- when we watch total rubbish like Big Brother or X Factor or Get Me Out of Here I'm a Celebrity or the nonsense that Top Gear has become- we glorify the wrong things. We are sucked into a vacuous pit of crap and seem to elevate that debased thinking as something worthwhile. When we watch Quentin Tarantino's take of killing and more killing, for example, we become inured to suffering, to tragedy and in the process we lose ourselves completely. This is sad beyond words. A young man is murdered in cold blood and we see the act as it happens. Where will it end? The real perpetrators of these terrbile acts are the ones who orchestrated the disintegraton of ancient cultures for profit. I will not go down the political route but it is on everyone's lips- we started this mess and now look what has happened! The world, and neither will we, ever be the same.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee." John Donne.