Some of my friends are outraged by the fact that one media story after another comes along analyzing to the nth degree the known facts in the case of Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot who committed suicide and took 150 strangers along with him, while at the same time the cold-blooded, deliberate murder of 148 university students in Kenya merits only a passing mention. Depending on your media feed, your results may differ: I’m not in the US and only rarely pick up the NYT, so I’ve seen less Lubitz and more Garissa– but not enough to make me feel that a just equality of attention has been applied to these two stories, analogous by number and by horror but different in so many other regards.

The hasty conclusion is that the Kenyans’ deaths matter less than the Europeans’ because they were black. And relatively less well-off (though as university students they were part of a lucky minority in their home country). To better gauge the proportion of sheer racism, however, read “The Structure of Foreign News” (1965) by the great peace scholar Johan Galtung, where it’s reported that the importance given to a news story will be a factor of geography (is it close to us?), of identification (did it happen to people like us?), legibility, confirmation bias, and other features– go read the article, it’s better than my ability to summarize today. So obviously for European media, the Germanwings crash ranks higher than a Kenyan massacre on many of these scores. But Galling wasn’t just observing that this is the way of the world: he was convinced that if this is the way of the world, it is wrong, and we should counterbalance our egocentric news media in order to give reality to the sufferings of people distant from us on this or that axis.

And another reason for paying more attention to Kenya and less to Germanwings. What happened in the Alps was a one-off thing, extremely unlikely to happen to you (though of course it could, despite whatever new security measures are installed). What happened at Garissa is a lamentably frequent thing these days, and could indeed happen to you, maybe not this week or this year, but sooner or later, if something is not done to rein in the free romp of heavily-armed religious madmen. I don’t specifically mean the madmen in the Villains of the Week Club; there’s a lot of madness to go around. Let us stop funding one bunch of madmen in the hopes that they will do something more agreeable to our interests than whatever the last bunch of madmen (possibly funded by us, or by people in competition with us) did. And (a far more subordinate issue) let us stop whingeing about whether the diagnosis of depression in the co-pilot’s case is stigmatizing for other depressed people, and blabbering about it with such frequency that this seems to be the major problem facing humanity at this moment. (People do tend to talk about what concerns them, and they like to fill the air with whatever they have expertise in, but enough is enough.) Let the ancient formula of damnatio memoriae be applied to Andreas what’s-his-name, and let the students of Garissa, the women of Nigeria, and all such victims of armed bigotry occupy our attention most urgently.