SATURDAY PERSONAL NOTE: The story of the gang rape in India continues to be a huge one internationally — one that touches on many issues and could have consequences for India — the world’s largest democracy — as noted HERE. We’ll be running many of the wire stories dealing with that this weekend.
FOOTNOTE: I lived in India from January 1972 -May 1972 (I interned on The Hindustan Times newspaper) and from September 1973 – May 1975 (when I was the official stringer for the Chicago Daily News and wrote for other newspapers throughout the world). There was no case like this when I was living there.
If you look at the evolution of societies, just as America’s mass killings have grown more shocking, this crime to India is incredibly shocking. Societies have yet to figure out how to halt trending where the bar on empathy is lowered further and further down. The focus is on other issues in the media, but fostering greater empathy for others is a major challenge to many nations as we head further into the 21st century.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.