J’ACCUSE        

            The advent of the smartphone with its in-built camera and the availability of Facebook and the mass media have become the tools whereby too many of us trivialise the suffering and loss of those we do not know. To stand and photograph men women and children laying dying in the streets in Brussels, Paris, or Nice rather than come to their aid if only to be with them during their dying moments is an indictment against all who have lost their humanity.

            We listen to the numbers of dead from the lips of the carefully coiffured TV announcers as if recording the result of some obscene game; one hundred and twenty three dead they gleefully announce as the mythical Devil licks his lips.

            Yet each is a father, mother, sister, brother, daughter, son a living breathing human being with the same aspirations as the voyeurs who cold bloodily stand and watch.

            How have we forgotten that ‘there but for the grace of God go I?

Why doesn’t our humanity shout out and say?,

            ‘No we will not let their deaths be in vain.’
Later we stand and light candles and cry but where were we in their moment of need?