'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
Young Lives Damaged by War
Bara’a, 10, originally from Ghouta, Syria, leaves for school from her informal refugee camp in Mount Lebanon. | Bassam Khawaja / © 2016 Human Rights Watch.
Over 9,000 children killed or injured in the conflict, according to verified data, with an average of one child killed every 10 hours since monitoring began
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Children ride in the back of a truck as families flee from in Idlib Governate from escalating violence. | Photo from UNICEF.
14 March 2020 (Wall Street International)* — These are words from a poem by José Ángel Valente “… after a shipwreck, after so many things that have been destroyed within ourselves…”.
Too many things must indeed have been destroyed within ourselves if we can still see —without being moved, and becoming outraged!— the pictures of thousands of refugees (including children and old people!) in the Greek-Turkish border, the border between Mexico and US, the Mediterranean sea…
DAYLESFORD, Australia, 15 March 2020 — As the human onslaught against life on Earth accelerates, no part of the biosphere is left pristine. The simple act of consuming more than we actually need drives the world’s governments and corporations to endlessly destroy more and more of the Earth to extract the resources necessary to satisfy our insatiable desires.
Robert J. Burrowes
In fact, an initiative of the World Economic Forum has just reported that ‘For the first time in history, more than 100 billion tonnes of materials are entering the global economy every year’ – see ‘The Circularity Gap Report 2020’ – which means that, on average, every person on Earth uses more than 13 tonnes of materials each year extracted from the Earth.
As I have explained elsewhere, however, the psychological damage we have all suffered, which leaves us with unmet but critically important emotional needs (and, in many cases, the sense that our lives are meaningless), cannot be rectified by material consumption. Despite this, most of us will spend our lives engaged in a futile attempt to fill the aching void in our psyche by consuming and accumulating, at staggering cost to the Earth.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 