This week's earthquake in Haiti has, at current estimates, killed at least 50,000 and has made over 300,00 people homeless....
....and if I'm honest, I really don't care.
Don't give a shit, couldn't give a monkey's.
Don't get me wrong, on one level I know that these people are experiencing a human tragedy that I really have no comprehension of, but still I find myself looking at images of the dust-caked survivors being pulled from the ground and I feel nothing.
It all started on October the 23rd, 1984. Michael Buerk's now famous news report from Ethiopia highlighting the famine there was the first push downhill of the media snowball. In the years since, it has just been one humanitarian crisis after another, disaster upon disaster, and I'm sorry, but Compassion Fatigue has well and truly set in.
I've become so overexposed to starving black babies with flies in their eyes, roadside ditches filled with dead Kosovans or Rwandan rebels butchering civilians that I now just stare blankly at these news reports, wondering what the next emotionally blackmailed tv advert will be.
I'm not an uncharitable, uncaring person, I currently donate monthly to three charities that I believe do good work both here in the UK and around the globe:
In a purely selfish way, I feel better knowing that "I've done my bit", and indeed I've doubled my donation to the British Red Cross this month in the knowledge that I'm probably paying for five plastic water buckets for some Haitian families.
Job done.
Conscience clean.
At least until the next A-list celebrity pops up and tells us that we really need to give more for the next humanitarian disaster.
