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The Black Sea at night, 1879, Ivan Aivazovski

ACAA*, my latest for New Scientist

I can visualize the characters from my previous comic book collection, or see the comet on tv moving through space while the Star Trek theme plays and bright particles chase close behind tailing that space rock.

I can recall painful impressions of black and white stills, lose stripe button up shirts on the thin pale forms of men frail from starvation in a concentration camp,

and the tiny African boys with bone thin limbs, their prominent ribs showing with distended stomachs from bloating,

and the horror of more children who were blown up in the dangerous scenery from the news scenes I’ve seen play out through the current week, broken bodies laid out on the busted concrete with their cold and dusted gray faces.

I wonder how and why all these horrible things could keep happening, and why they are not deeply impacting everyone else like they do me?

Do other people see what I see? Can they pull these terrible visions from their memories, or are their minds as empty as their empathy?