Norway - what to make of it?

I'm a little surprised that we are all so devastated by the attacks on the government and those attending a summer camp in Norway on Friday 22 July 2011. Is it the number of deaths that propel such emotion, media reportage that saturates communications technologies with partial facts, speculation and fear, the fact that Norway is a peaceful country and we don't expect this kind of thing to happen in a place not already at war, or that Anders Behring Breivik the suspected perpetrator of this deed, disguised himself in a police uniform and was by all accounts a Christian fundamentalist? Is it because we consider the innocence of those who died in the attack and are more sympathetic to innocence than to the death of those already involved in killing or oppressing others on a day to day basis? Since these individuals were just going about their day to day activities, do we ask whether this might happen to us one day? Is all this fear and concern for others, really just a concern for self preservation? As I ponder these questions, I note with interest that approximately 150,000 people worldwide die every day and about a quarter of those people die because of poverty, the remainder through war, disease, injury and natural causes! Since only 90 people (and this figure may change) died in this attack, it surely can't be just this fact that has caused such emotion? No, I think that the media, with its capacity to focus in on particular, minute fragments (the family of those deceased, the character of the perpetrator, the possible reasons for his behavior, the feelings of the President, the public reactions, the rationale behind terrorist attacks) expands the event to something which becomes monstrous as it exponentially grows. We've seen this all before in the 9/11 reportage or more recent events like the tsunami that obliterated many prefectures in Japan; the continual loop and re-looping of the footage, the close-ups terror on people's faces, the postmortem, analysis and the sickening reiteration and glut of information that changes from minute to minute leaving audiences unable to decipher truth from facts. The ultimate point of it all to blame someone, an ideology, a position that is untenable and yet so much evil is conducted in the world that is not spoken of, or if it is, then those who have made it so will never be called to account!