Leading editorial (Extracted from "Why this is no time for compassion fatigue", The Independent, 12 October 2005)

"This will be remembered as the year in which nature made clear its indifference to the fate of mankind. First came the tsunami, which wiped out 225,000 lives on Boxing Day morning. In Niger, the West was slow to wake up to the famine engulfing that African country. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which transformed a vibrant American city into a fetid, uninhabitable swamp. Now comes the Kashmir earthquake.....

An over-used phrase this year has been "compassion fatigue". Some have suggested the British public's willingness to donate to emergency relief funds is dwindling. We are confident that this is not the case."

[Ed: I'm afraid "public" opinion is right and The Independent is wrong. (It is actually "middle-class" opinion -- that of the "chattering classes" -- which talks of "compassion fatigue" because it is mainly they who donate to international charities -- for reasons that we need not try to analyse here.) We have evolved for millions of years as a small-group species and cannot cope with too much emotional information, being increasingly heaped on us by the media. We are now in danger of substantially reducing donations even to those charities in which we can be confident that the funds are being used efficiently.]