Putting a face on tragedy

Every day, I, like many of you, read the newspaper. My eyes scanned through the horrific accounts of terrorist bombings, hostage situations, natural disasters and murders. But because I read them so often, it's very rare that I seem to be affected by them. Read over them and don't even stop to consider the reality of what I'm reading.\nThat changed Tuesday.\nIt was Tuesday afternoon that I read an Associated Press story about the Israeli terrorist bus bombings. And as I read through the numbers dead and the numbers injured, I barely comprehended what the figures meant -- to have so many lives lost.\nBut then I read the story of one man.\nThis one man was sitting in the seat behind the driver on one of those buses and, though he didn't know it at the time, next to the suicide bomber. But something saved his life -- a good deed.\nWhen this man in the front of the bus saw an elderly woman with several packages board, he gave up his seat and moved to the back of the bus.\nHe lived. She died.\nYou could hear in the dry black-and-white quote on the page the overwhelming sense of guilt he felt for what he had done. He lived. She died.\nNo good deed goes unpunished.\nIt was at that moment, reading this man's story, that I let the world get to me. I let myself realize that all over the world, every day, mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sons and daughters die. And our society quantifies it in numbers. Not names, not faces. Just numbers.\nAnd maybe if I hadn't read that story Tuesday afternoon, I wouldn't have been as appalled by what I saw on the front page of The New York Times Wednesday morning. Maybe if I was just thinking in terms of numbers I wouldn't have cared.\nBut I cared. I was thinking of the people involved. I was thinking of that kind man and that old woman.\nSo when I saw the picture of a dead woman hanging out of the bus window next to a charred, detached arm, I wanted to be sick.\nYou could see her face. You could see her anguish. You could see death in her open eyes.\nAnd I was furious -- that was someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's mother. But to The New York Times, she was just another nameless dead number. Just another victim in the endless list of casualties that is now the world we live in.\nAnd as I looked at her face, I couldn't help but be disgusted with this society, where we are so sensitive about our own terrorist attack. Just one.\nIf a newspaper in Afghanistan or Iraq or Israel or anywhere had splattered our dead across their front page, we would have been horrified. We would've shouted, "That's someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's mother." We would've been indignant: "How dare you display our tragedy in such an insensitive manner."\nBut it was someone else, in some other country, in some other universe. So we didn't care that the charred arm we saw could've belonged to the old woman who took that young man's seat. But I bet her family did.\nAnd while I'm not asking anyone to fully comprehend the tragedies that we read about -- because that would make anyone insane -- I am asking you to consider them.\nConsider someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's mother.