In 2024, I thought a lot about

Towards the end of last year, I saw a bloodied, dead baby outside a hospital.

A couple of days later, I saw another one, outside a different public building.

I've been seeing dead babies quite frequently since, and I've noticed a lot of people seem to ignore them. Maybe they don’t see them at all.

The day after my first sighting, my alarm went off at 7am as usual. I brushed my teeth after squeezing out the final lumps of toothpaste from the tube. Then I watched a video that had been taken a few days prior of children playing outside that same hospital. I wondered if one of them was the dead baby I’d seen. I logged on for work at 9am, as usual. I joined my Teams calls, as usual. And as usual, I responded to some chat about the dismal British weather. Dismal weather that I went out in that evening to attend a vigil. I grasped my friends’ arms so we didn’t lose each other in the crowd, and the pouring rain soaked through our coats. I went home and ate dinner. Then, as usual, I folded up the mess of clothes on my bedroom floor.  

It might have looked like it from the outside, but nothing about that day was average or normal. And the idea that the next day would come and I’d likely wake up and see another dead baby made my stomach turn.

I had always known this was an issue that many people had convinced themselves it was OK to choose to tune out of, and ignore. It was too complicated, it started too long ago, and it encapsulated so many wrongdoings.  

That attitude was worrying, but I’d separated ignorance from indifference. I believed that if a fellow human saw what I saw, they would also be distraught. At the very least, they would acknowledge the pain, if not do what they could to stop it. So I wondered: had they not seen the bloodied, dead baby too?

I knew they had. There was no way they couldn’t have. And if not the baby outside the hospital, then the one outside the school, or the one in the old market in its crib. I’ve seen so many that surely even the wilfully ignorant people have been confronted by something.  There’s no way algorithms have allowed the vast majority to evade this: 

TikToks about girlhood. 

A timeline of the Drake/Kendrick feud. 

How to have a brat summer. 

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And a clip of a mother screaming for her child.

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How ignorant can wilful ignorance really be? They’re aware but unaffected. They’re indifferent. 

After the loss of a loved one, it’s common to wonder how the world keeps spinning. Your world is shaken – but that’s just it isn’t it? It’s only your world and so even in the throes of grief, most people can understand that life outside their immediate parameters goes on, its rhythm unchanged. 

If most people can understand that, there’s an implication that – if the breadth and depth of loss were vast enough – normal, empathetic humans all over the world could reach a level of collective grief that would jolt life’s rhythm. This year, I’ve thought a lot about how no, that isn’t the case.

Over the last year, I’ve watched a massive group of intelligent, politically-aware people be indifferent to violent death. 

And it is not a singular loss. I keep thinking about a quote that was attributed to a newly childless mother: “All my beloved ones are gone.”

If there is a loss that exists wider and deeper than this, I cannot conceive it.

So surely, now, the loss is vast enough?

Yet normal, usually empathetic people go about their daily lives, unconcerned. 

Most of us, myself included, hold a degree of separation that we must reckon with. If we didn’t, our lives would look drastically different since the very first day any of us saw a dead baby. And some people’s do – nurses and doctors who have volunteered, aid workers who risk their lives every day – but they’re not in the majority. I just didn’t expect that the average degree of separation would be quite so high. That there would be quite so many people who seem not to care about what is ‘over there’. So I’ve asked myself, what is left ‘here’? And what’s here is apathy. I sit next to apathy on the tube every day. I know apathy. And apathy makes me feel embarrassed to be human. Embarrassed by the ease with  which humans can look the other way.

Towards the end of last year, I watched a video of a press conference on Twitter. It took place outside Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. At first, the camera focused on the speaker: a doctor at the front of a group of medical staff who were standing around a podium. The camera zoomed out and slowly allowed more information into the shot. First, a sea of dead bodies wrapped in cloth. Next, at the bottom-centre of the screen, a man holding a child. A bloodied, dead baby.