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The reporter warned us the scenes we were about to see would be disturbing, yet millions watched with shocked fascination and horror at the macabre scene of hundreds and thousands of displaced people in refugee camps where starvation and disease took a life every few minutes. Lack of protein bloated children's stomachs, and images of stick thin arms and legs portrayed them in an abstract manner. People had become so emaciated they barely cast a shadow on the hard parched ground. Hollow eyes mirrored their despair, hopelessness and grief.

My heart went out to them. I cried for the mother who held her dead baby to her empty breast. I cried for the father who brushed the flies from his dying son. Under the canopy of a make shift Red Cross hospital a French doctor holds what I thought to be an infant but in fact was a five year old girl. He stated it was too late for her and she only had a few hours to live. The child stared into the camera. It broke my heart; I wanted to hold the child, I wanted to protect her, I wanted to save her. Her beseeching eyes still haunt me today.

That news report was over thirty years ago from Biafra. A million people died in Biafra because of famine, war and disease. Headlines of poverty and starvation were an important news story then because it shocked us; viewers felt empathy and donated to charitable organizations wanting to help their fellow man.

What about today, what turned empathy to apathy? Why don't stories of poverty grab the public as it did over thirty years ago? What does it take to make poverty an important news story today?

The same source that brought the news of poverty is also partially to blame for our indifference, our waning interest of impoverished crises of the world today. People are fickle creatures; we have to be stimulated everyday to keep our interests peeked, especially in this day and age of modern technology.

Headlines scream every day of murders, beatings, drug dealers, terrorists, etc. We've come to except this as the norm of our daily lives. We've come accustomed to violence though movies, video games and television programs so much so that we've become desensitized to violence. We've come accustomed to scenes of children living in squalor on garbage dumps, or child carrying water from a contaminated river. We've all seen these disturbing scenes on TV from the comfort of our living-rooms every day. But do we do anything about it? Do these scenes still have the same shock value as it did when first aired?

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