Bad news overload starts to run off

It’s almost too much to hold in your head.

Just 16 days ago, a man opened fire on a music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds. Remember that? It has since almost vanished from the news, except for the dark world of conspiracy theorists with their legion of “real stories” about what happened — FBI sting operations, gun-running, ISIS, you name it.

The story’s vanished, despite the fact we still know next to nothing about why it happened, buried under the onslaught of the next churn of the news cycle.

This week, 300 were killed and hundreds seriously injured in a truck bomb attack in Somalia. It was blip on the North American news, a footnote marking deaths and injuries to the equivalent of an entire small town. Mogadishu’s worst terrorist attack ever, just as Las Vegas attack was the worst modern gun massacre in the United States.

It’s hard not to become inured to it all. Every day, there is a news story chronicling the first-person experience, someone pouring out their pain in such a visceral and raw way that it hurts to watch and read and listen — and even before you can think about it, that person is gone and has been replaced by the next.

The bucket of world news is so big — and there’s so little time to absorb it — that the whole thing is, for me at least, condensing into a slideshow.

And the news cycle has no discernment, guessing at what producers and editors think we want to know — are scores of people killed and left homeless by California fires equal to, or lesser than, the growing distaste for Harvey Weinstein’s offensive proclivities for sexual harassment and assault?

Look out — skies in London are yellow, apparently with grit blown north by a hurricane. And wait — that hurricane was supposed to have hit Ireland by now, the deaths-by-hurricane clock already clicking through 1-2-3 as I write this, so Irish misery will replace Californian misery for a day or so, and meanwhile, an oil rig has exploded in Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. Thirty-two people have died in Portugal and Spain in wildfires, and chances are, you could have missed that entirely.

Puerto Rico? Still suffering. Many in Houston and southern Florida are forgotten by now as well, even as mould conquers their wet worlds. There are new pictures, there is new sound, there is new pain. Tweak those sympathy-receptors, because, at a safe broadcast distance, it takes more and more to make us feel.

Things come at us in a rush, often mere minutes after they happen, and vanish every bit as quickly, replaced by the next chapter in the great long volume of man’s inhumanity to man, human heartache edition. Weinstein has only replaced the last grotesque example of abuse of power, his vileness to be overwritten sometime in the near future by the next, probably even more grotesque example of abuse of power.

I don’t mean to be flip, but things now happen and disappear so quickly that it’s hard to remember that they’ve even happened, or when they happened, or where — and with that, it’s almost hard to accept that they are actually real.

I wonder how long it will be before we let the most heinous of occurrences run off us like water. Gamblers get hooked on the endorphin rush of winning, but that flush wears off; we’re all human, riding the waves of our internal chemistry, even when it’s triggered by visceral pain.

I wonder if it will reach an entirely possible point. I wonder when — and I mean when, not if — when, outside of the circle of our immediate family and friends, we’ll simply stop caring altogether.

Oh, and lose what it is to be human.

Russell Wangersky’s column appears in 35 SaltWire newspapers and websites in Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at rwanger@thetelegram.com - Twitter: @wangersky.