Over the past forty-eight hours, two major tragedies have crossed our television screens. The first, and most well-known, was the shooting of two journalists by a disgruntled former colleague in Roanoke, Virginia. The bigger, but largely ignored, tragedy was the death of as many as fifty migrants in a truck on the side of an Austrian highway. They suffocated to death in the truck, which people smugglers then abandoned on the side of the highway. Passing motorists noticed the smell and liquid seeping out of the truck. Authorities have been unable to determine the exact number of victims due to decomposition.
The Roanoke shooting has received endless coverage since Wednesday morning, with constant eulogies for the victims and reflections on what the uploaded video of the killings suggests about our society. The migrant deaths, on the other hand, have largely been covered by NPR and PBS.
My Gut Reaction: As tragic as what happened in Roanoke was, it pales beside the tragedy in Austria, as well as the broader tragedy of the European migrant crisis.
Analysis below the fold...
As tragic as the shootings in Roanoke were, they were in the end individual tragedies, not different than the thousands of other shootings that take place every year in the United States, other than the fact that they were on live television.
What happened in Austria, on the other hand, was a mass tragedy, not only in its own right, but as part of the greater tragedy of migrants trying to find a better life in Europe. Thousands of people have died trying to get to Europe either across the Mediterranean or through the Balkans.
The details of the Austrian case add to the horror. The details are truly grotesque, as Bethany Bell of the BBC related:
The lorry in which dozens of people died was sitting in a lay-by on the main motorway between Vienna and the Hungarian and Slovakian borders.
As we drove past, I saw police in white forensic suits combing the area for evidence.
It is hot. The smell of so many decomposing bodies close up must be difficult to take.
As horrible as what happened in Roanoke was, the victims were not left to rot on the side of the road.
One issue is the lack of attention to foreign events other than wars by large portions of the American public. Newspapers and TV news increasingly ignore foreign news in favor of increasingly vapid domestic coverage. People can name Kardashian spawn far more easily than foreign leaders.
Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder whether part of the issue is that while the victims in the Roanoke case were telegenic white reporters, while the victims in Austria were impoverished, in all likelihood non-white migrants.