Paris, in a DoubleTweet with Nigeria

[ by Charles Cameron — what’s the value of a human life in tweets, in column inches, in my attention span? ]

.

I really don’t have much to say — I’ve lived a year in Paris, have never been to Nigeria, am human.

"Dead bodies are littered everywhere." Boko Haram has carried out a week-long massacre in northeast Nigeria. http://t.co/GOFS0UpRMO

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) January 9, 2015

Learning from Twitter that being killed in Paris makes a person far more important, worthy of discussion than being killed in Baga, Nigeria.

— drew hinshaw (@drewfhinshaw) January 9, 2015

**

I was in Managua shortly after the 1972 earthquake there, driving past block after block of city rubble with yellow flags indicating the locations of bodies buried too deep to be recovered. My Pentax served to dilute and capture my emotions then, as my DoubleTweet and other formalisms do now with these mind-numbing horrors piled on horrors.