Others

Image by Amanna Avena

The tortured.  The starving.  The dispossessed.  I see them more, now, on the news.  I don’t mean television.  Television does not show and tell.  It does not have the time between “when we come back” and the next corporate owners’ sell song. We know that, and that’s no news.

News is fact analyzed in depth, articulated cogently, shown graphically, and ,if opinion, stated so at the beginning. Much of this is on digital versions of newspapers and newsmagazines that have shaped their messages into the current medium. So I stream while I sit sipping my coffee and munching my toast with butter and marmalade, watching pictures and reading words of the world I am fortunate enough not to live in.

But I do.

I am aware while sipping my coffee and munching my toast with butter and marmalade there are others who cannot do that, who may have never done that, who may have done that, and if they have, their faces tell me they have forgotten or are not thinking about coffee, toast, and marmalade.  They are not thinking about me.  They don’t even know I exist.

But I know they exist.  In one sense – and I don’t even know what that is – I suffer because they are there.