Rose by any other name...

is just as sweet.

War, even if it is as yet nameless, as what the Straits Times reported the current war going on between Israel and Lebanon, is just as cruel, dehumanizing, brutal. even if the war does not have a name, children still die, people still suffer, homes still get shattered, families torn asunder.

yet... despite the intense tragedy, i feel neither grief nor pain when i see the pictures of the carnage and death of the war in the papers or on TV. have i been desensitized so much that i have lost my empathy for people? or perhaps i never had it in the first place?

yet... i felt really anxious and worried for my students when they were taking this assessment of theirs. so... why empathy for one group facing a much less dire fate and nothing for another which is undergoing what must be the greatest of human suffering?

the connection perhaps. the distance, physical and emotional.

there was something else that i wanted to write. but i forgot. whatever then.