When One Death Matters More Than Thousands
Written by Rebecca M. Bell ✍🏼
Filed under: Thoughts, prayers, and engineered apathy
The sand runs red: one headline elevated, countless lives buried.
Thesis: The spectacle of one white man’s public assassination has dominated global headlines, while ongoing atrocities—including the genocide in Gaza and the disappearance of detainees from ICE’s Everglades detention facility—remain unacknowledged. This disparity exposes the machinery of selective empathy and the engineered apathy of Western media culture.
Introduction
The Western news cycle thrives on spectacle. One body falls in public, and the world rushes to declare a turning point. The assassination of a white political figure triggered endless headlines, special coverage, and debates about democracy itself. Yet this reaction to a single death contrasts sharply with the muted, almost nonexistent response to mass atrocities unfolding daily.
For months, I—and millions of others—have watched genocide in Gaza via livestream on our screens. Children pulled from rubble. Hospitals reduced to dust. Parents recording their last words to the world. I do not write this lightly: I have seen a child filmed after being disemboweled, their body hung by their intestines. If there is a summit of horror, this is it.
So forgive me if one assassination doesn’t shake me. My grief already knows higher thresholds.
Gaza Through the Screen
The genocide in Gaza is one of the most documented atrocities in modern history, captured by civilians in real time and disseminated globally through social media. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly warned of war crimes and collective punishment of civilians.
Unlike past genocides—where testimony came decades later—this one is broadcast live.
Because the footage is raw, continuous, and unsparing, the issue becomes not access to truth but the capacity of audiences to endure it. Western media often filters or attenuates these images, giving consumers the illusion they didn’t see—or that it’s too complex or “foreign” to care about.
The Vanishing Detainees of Alligator Alcatraz
Meanwhile, another atrocity festers— closer to home. Reports indicate that over a thousand detainees formerly listed at ICE’s Everglades detention facility—nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz—have disappeared from official rosters. Some names are marked “Call ICE for details.” Others are gone entirely.
Advocates warn this constitutes enforced disappearance. The Guardian recently reported that Luis Manuel Rivas Velásquez, long believed dead, was in fact alive but transferred without his family or lawyers being notified—vanished by bureaucratic sleight of hand. If one man can be disappeared so easily, what of hundreds?
Best case: quietly deported.
Worst case: shackled, flown over open water, dropped, and drowned.
The very plausibility of this scenario testifies to the dehumanization of migrants in American detention.
Deaths in Detention: A Pattern
The ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights, and American Oversight published Deadly Failures, a landmark report documenting at least 70 deaths in ICE custody between 2017 and 2024. Independent reviewers concluded that 95% of these deaths were preventable with proper medical care.
Key findings include:
ICE allowed video evidence related to detainee deaths to be destroyed.
Eyewitnesses were released just before investigators arrived.
In 88% of cases, ICE medical staff provided incorrect or incomplete diagnoses.
In 79% of cases, treatment was delayed or inadequate.
Facilities falsified wellness-check records before suicides.
These are not isolated errors but a systemic pattern of neglect and evasion: deaths uncounted, accountability avoided, contracts expanded even after fatalities. As the report notes, ICE often releases detainees immediately before death to avoid reporting obligations.
The Machinery of Selective Empathy
The contrast is stark: one assassination dominates the narrative, while thousands of brown and black lives end in silence. The machinery of selective empathy is deliberate. Western audiences are conditioned to see some deaths as tragic and others as inevitable. A public assassination of a white figure resonates as a rupture in order; the bombing of Palestinian families or disappearance of migrants is written off as background noise.
This hierarchy of grief is not natural—it is engineered. Spectacle is elevated. Systems of violence are minimized.
One death is deemed history. Thousands are treated with silence.
Why This Matters
I am not a politician, historian, or journalist with institutional backing. I am a witness. Like many others, I have sat with my phone in hand and watched horrors that should never have been filmed—horrors that should never have been allowed.
If you mourn one man’s assassination but remain unmoved by the livestreamed genocide of thousands, then your grief has been curated for you. I write not to scold but to confront: who taught you which lives matter, and why have you accepted it?
Conclusion
When history looks back, it will not ask only who killed, but who stayed silent. Silence is not neutrality. It is complicity. If one assassination can shake us, genocide should shatter us. If we can account for one body in detail, we must demand answers for the thousands erased.
The choice is stark: mourn all, or admit what you’ve chosen.
In mourning for the nameless, and in defiance of forgetting,
—Rebecca M. Bell
[Self-Proclaimed] Editor in Chief of the Literary Resistance
P.S. I want to leave you with a poem from my book, A Collection of Momentum, published in April 2025. I wrote it with the hope that one day, we’d shatter the glass of apathy. That hope feels urgent now.
Fostering Apathy Apathy is not an accident. It is engineered. Dripped slow like poison Into headlines and timelines, Buried beneath the chaos They call “breaking news.” It does not grow wild— It is watered. Fed with distraction, Groomed with fear, Clipped of outrage Before it can bloom into action. You were not born numb. You were made this way. Taught to scroll past suffering With desensitized thumbs, To mourn with memes, To vote with emojis, To believe that exhaustion Is the same as defeat. They know exactly what they’re doing. Ten crises a week. Twelve executive orders before lunch. A new villain. A new outrage. A new tragedy to forget by Thursday. You are drowning in information But starving for truth. And while you sleepwalk through headlines, They are redrawing the lines. Banning the books. Gutting the courts. Detaining the bodies You’ve been trained not to see. This is not coincidence. This is design. They do not fear your anger— They fear your awakening. Because apathy is a weapon. And you are the barrel. Every silence, Every shrug, Every “what can I even do?” Fires another round. So look closely. Feel deeply. Rage freely. You are not helpless. You are being hypnotized. They smother the world in static— And call it peace.
Works Cited
Amnesty International. Israel/OPT: Evidence of War Crimes amid Israel’s Relentless Bombardment of Gaza. Amnesty International, 20 Oct. 2023.
American Civil Liberties Union, Physicians for Human Rights, and American Oversight. Deadly Failures: Preventable Deaths in U.S. Immigration Detention. ACLU, July 2024.
Common Dreams. “Over 1,000 Detainees Disappeared From Florida ICE Prison ‘Alligator Alcatraz’.” Common Dreams, 25 Aug. 2025.
Economic Times. “Hundreds of Immigrants Disappear From Infamous Florida ICE Prison ‘Alligator Alcatraz’.” Economic Times, 25 Aug. 2025.
Human Rights Watch. Israel: Apparent War Crimes in Gaza. Human Rights Watch, 27 Oct. 2023.
The Guardian. “Immigrant Believed Dead at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Was Alive, Secretly Transferred.” The Guardian, 29 Aug. 2025.
United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. UN Experts: Israel’s Bombardment and Siege of Gaza Amount to Collective Punishment. OHCHR, 12 Nov. 2023.
Filed under: Thoughts, prayers, and engineered apathy