Fifty souls dead of thirst. Not in some medieval plague-ridden hamlet, not in the fall of Rome, but in our own time. A lorry carrying migrants breaks down in the Sahara.
And what do we have? A flurry of headlines, a brief glance, then a shrug. It is not that the desert is cruel.
It is that we have built a system that funnels desperate people into its maw. We decry the traffickers with noble fury while our own policies make their trade inevitable. This is not merely a tragedy.
It is a culmination of our intellectual decadence, our refusal to see that national borders without humanitarian corridors are nothing but death sentences. We compare ourselves to the Victorians with their moral certainties. But at least they had the decency to feel shame.
Today we have algorithms and outrage cycles. Fifty dead. The desert does not care.
And neither, it seems, do we.
