Anam Cara

The Ones We Never Hear From

This absence also works at the social level. Society is coming more and more to mirror the media, yet the media are no innocent surface or screen on which anything and everything is welcome to appear. No. The media work with a powerful selectivity. They construct their world around carefully chosen, repetitive, and loud chronicles. Yet there are so many people we never hear from. We never read of them in the papers. We never hear of them in the news. A whole range of people are absent. They are usually the poor, the vulnerable, the ill, and prisoners. Their voices would be slow and direct and would gnaw at our comfort and endanger our complacency. Most of us who are privileged live quite protected lives and are distant from and blind to what the poor endure. Out of sight, out of mind. What is absent from our view does not concern us.