In India, at least 34 people got killed and 50 injured in a train derailment. In France, an airplane carrying 148 passengers and crew members crashed. In Peru, a bus crash left 36 people dead and 70 others injured.
These are some of the stories I read at work yesterday. Grave accidents. Massive deaths. The injuries that I can hardly imagine. Debris and mess. Fear, scream, shock, pains, and as yet unknown impacts.
I am used to these stories. My daily job is to analyze stories about corporations' massive corruption, environmental destruction, harms on people, and poor safety management. Reading about people's deaths have always been a big part of this job.
However, when I was reading one article after another as usual, one moment came that stopped me all of a sudden. I got confused. I had absolutely no idea of how to react to these stories. I was clicking on buttons, reading news, doing more clicks, typing, etc, but really? Is this how I react to the stories of deaths? What am I feeling - am I feeling anything?
One might say, don't get too depressed or overwhelmed by those stories, because they are accidents, which are very unfortunate but out of human control in the end. But, no. No. That's not a fair truth. In a number of fatal accidents, one can trace back their causes, which will tell you it wasn't completely out of human control. Name it - poor infrastructure that nobody took care of for many years, lack of safety measures simply because of low investment in it, workers who were exhausted by stressful work and poor treatment when they made a mistake that led to a disaster. In many cases, accidents result from wrong disposition of money and resources, which could have been done differently.
However, my question is not about the causes of the accidents. Cause and effect, whom to blame, what we can do better in the future - they are important topics, but my question today is not about them. I am just helplessly perplexed about how I should be, at the news of strangers' deaths. How should one face a fact of death? How should one, as a human being, react to the deaths of other human beings - the deaths of the people who have no personal relations to himself? What attitude is a proper attitude? What attitude is a natural attitude?
The reason why I ever have a question about the way to look at a stranger's death is this.
I think, for a fair-minded human being, there should be a consistent way to look at another human being's death, at least to begin with. Whoever's death it is, the first, immediate approach to the news should be consistent - with a certain degree of respect for a deceased's past life, sorrow for the loss - not my loss, but the world's loss, and mourning for a once-significant part of the human community that has now gone. Without establishing a way to look at somebody's death, I'm afraid, one's perception of a death will get swayed by the way that, for instance, media puts the death - as part in the mass, as a mere number, as an insignificance, or as something to be particularly sad or important. Media gives different weights on different deaths, but that doesn't have to be the way people look at deaths.
I'm still pondering the question.