Life & Mortality Quote by Bruce Jackson

Disaster footage doesn’t just inform; it curates whose suffering counts. Bruce Jackson’s line pivots on that quiet moral scandal: not the number of bodies the tsunami left behind, but the selective floodlight trained on them. The sting is in the comparison he refuses to spell out, forcing the reader to supply the “other recent dead” - people killed in wars, in occupations, in famines, in neglected crises - whose absence from the screen is the real story.

The quote works because it weaponizes visibility. “We’ve seen” is doing double duty: it names the physical act of looking and the mediated act of being shown. In that small grammatical move, Jackson shifts responsibility from nature (a tsunami “happens”) to institutions (editors, governments, PR machines) that decide what gets framed as tragedy. The word “however” is a polite hinge, but the argument is not polite at all: compassion is being rationed by the optics of catastrophe.

Context matters. Tsunamis are spectacular: sudden, cinematic, “apolitical” in a way that makes them safe for wall-to-wall coverage and safe for donors. “Other recent dead” are messier - implicating policy, allies, and blame. Jackson, a public servant, is signaling an ethical accounting: if grief is triggered by images, then invisibility becomes a kind of second death. The subtext is an accusation: our attention is not neutral, and neither is the news.