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Tragedy grips the world every day like a soccerpal cradles a football. It is part and parcel of the daily existence of mother earth. Without bad things happening there can be no good things because everything would be a monotone shade of greyish beige, and nobody likes beige.

Nobody cried when tens of thousands died in the Sierra Leone civil war.

Nobody seems to give a shit that Mugabe is sanctioning the massacre of successful white farmers by incompetent indigenous peoples who then produce pathetic crops leading to the death of Zimbabweans.

Nobody white remembers the Amritsar massacre.

Nobody even knows of the upwards of 400'000 Fur people murdered by the Janjaweed militia in Sudan.

Hutus massacring Tutsis. 1000 Uzbek protesters murdered by their government in 2005. 2000 dead in the Gujarat in 2005 following a bombing.

So why the fuck am I expected by the media and by society to overbearingly care about one child who went missing because her parents royally fucked up? Yes, it's a tragedy, yes, the crime should be condemned, and yes, it should be reported in the news.

Yet I pick up a newspaper fully a month later and I see her face plastered across the front. I log onto my e-mail and get spam from tweenagers urging me to forward a picture of a bear to all my friends for Maddie. I see her face on kebab house doors urging me to ring a number if I have any information.

I have no information. I am running out of compassion and I have no interest whatsoever in reading about such a thing on a daily basis. It just makes me think that, from a completely apathetic view, that there is one less Everton fan in the world.

The last time something caught the public imagination in such a way? The death of Princess Diana. The British public has a morbid fascination with death and misery.

Now, a few carefully placed adverts and updates, and I would not have thought anything of it. Thought it was a shame, yes. But the way the newspapers, and media in general, have hijacked the story to sell copy makes me sick to the stomach.

Even more sickening is the way C-List celebrities jump on the "Find Maddie" bandwagon in an attempt to breathe new life into flagging careers.

More sickening still is the way the newspapers will take any tenuous lead and use it to string out the story. "We Have New Hope". Yeah. The only new hope I care about is the one starring Mark Hamil.

Millions of people die silently each year, and yet the newspapers keep reporting daily the (we pretty much have to assume) death of one toddler who died due to the negligence of her parents just to make a quick buck.

At times like this I wish I was a commie.

<3
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