Absolutely right (both you & pooley), though I don't really think Merrick's point was that the life of a child or other individual is futile in the light of massive killings or deaths occurring elsewhere, nor that one shouldn't do every possible thing to find a missing person. He rather meant that, when it's an adult rather than a child, there's no one who cares.
Furthermore, by playing the emo-card and over-dramatising rather than over-exposing (which cannot be possible in a missing child/person case: any exposure is good), the media, apart from their own dubious goals, are not necessarily helping. It makes people more prone to judge by their emotions - and though in and of itself this may be a good thing, it makes negative emotions stronger as well, resulting in people yelling for death penalties, castrations or whatever medieval shit. All in all, it creates an atmosphere of much agitation and little actual progress.
And it perpetuates the image of an unsafe, evil society, since people attribute higher probability rates to described rather than experienced events. Especially if these events are negative and if they get huge coverage. True, what if it's *your* kid? Well -and this is the point- it *isn't* your kid. Huge amounts of kids do not disappear. The problem is that, where in a disappearence case maximum exposure is necessary, this same over-coverage and emo-journalism is also deployed in cases where nothing can help - a killing of a kid or such... Combined with this is the increasing attitude of people to say at every dramatic over-covered event "there's a lesson to be learned from this". Well no there isn't - shit happens. And this is something that people should learn to live with or otherwise try to amend right here right now. And then I do not mean the parents of a missing child. But everyone else feeling a crushing pain for the "injustice in this cruel world" - no, please. First of all, this is an isolated event; second, for people worrying about the "condition humaine": stop whining and if you really feel bad about it *do* something. The risk of all these people getting all emotional is that it is shortlived and does not result in deeds, meaning that most of them will just go home and hurt the ones they love as if nothing happened.
I'm not advocating lack of empathy here. On the contrary, I'm advocating *true* empathy, which is the acknowledgement of another person's pain without having to resort to imagining what it would feel like when it happened to you. Because that, in the end, is not empathy. I mean, this would mean that I, still without kids, would be unable to imagine the pain of a parent losing their kid? Sounds pretty daft. I'm sorry if this seems overly rational, but people should learn, very consciously and explicitly so, not to hurt others. Emotional upheaval will get them nowhere.
arf & meow
ps: plus obviously also my earlier point that this way people are led to feel that any "innocent" life is worth more than a "non-innocent" life, while they should finally fucking learn to respect life in any form.
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