I’ve just been watching CNN, the story is the famine in Somalia.  It is the Horn of Africa, where early Man first crossed the sea to populate the world, the place where wheat was first cultivated. The Biblical Land of Punt, where Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s ships stopped to trade for frankincense.

Its the usual African tragedy, drought, famine, war, death.  There are 600,000 children dying of starvation, and the aid agencies can’t cope.  The refugee camps and the graveyards are overflowing.  The land is desolate, nothing grows or moves on it that is not close to death. There is death and rape and misery everywhere, and there are flies, flies all over the dying children, their parent (singular, one is always dead) too weak to brush them off.  The local guerrillas, Islamic fundamentalist thugs, refuse aid from the ‘Crusader West’.  The good guys, African Union troops, seem to have won a minor victory against them in Mogadishu, but it is clear that they are stretched thin and out of their depth, exhausted and poorly equipped. The enemy will be back and they are not ready to meet them again.

I see the video, the bony, starving children, its like the concentration camps in Germany all over again.  I know I should be outraged, horrified, but I feel nothing.  Oh yes, intellectually, I can see the scale of the catastrophe, I would like it to stop, but emotionally I feel nothing. I would  even be willing to make a contribution if I thought it would do any good…But I feel nothing,  I am just watching a video, and I feel guilty because I am not angry, furious.  I feel nothing.

We have it easy.  These people would love to have our economic problems, our political paralysis, our fear of the riots in England.  But why am I not angry, why can’t I feel the pain?  Am I so caught up in our problems?  Or is it that I just am dulled and jaded, numb, incapable of feeling an honest emotion?  Or perhaps that I am fat and lazy, spoiled and pampered?  The world is no stranger to misery, but we never had the means to do anything about it before.  Now we do, but nothing gets done, perhaps because people like me don’t care.  Bono is there, Iman is there, Anderson Cooper is there, in a ridiculous flak vest. I can’t bear to watch.

Six hundred thousand children.  Just think of it.  And I am not weeping or screaming at the television screen in outrage. I am glad I do not believe in God, because he would never forgive me for this.