I FEEL a total and absolute sense of anger. I listened to the afternoon news on May 31 when the first (lengthy) item dramatically informed the country of the departure of a Spice Girl from the 'band,' followed by the second item which announced, in a much less passionate way, that 5,000 people could be dead following earthquakes in Afghanistan.

No doubt if Glenn Hoddle had announced that afternoon that Paul Gascoigne would not be playing in the World Cup, the Afghan tragedy and loss of thousands of human lives would have been relegated to the third item of news.

What on earth have we become as a human race where we are brainwashed and fed trivial and inconsequential information about sex objects, louts and football over the death of thousands of people and the devastation of towns and villages - to say nothing of the famine in the Sudan or the onset of another nuclear arms race?

The anger that I feel, however, comes depressingly second to an overwhelming sense of sadness that we have as a society given in to the manipulative power of media consumerism and materialism that will eventually rob us of any degree of compassion.

PAT MAUDSLEY, Isherwood Street, Blackburn.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.