Without a Trace

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/world/europe/titan-sub-greek-migrant-boat.html

(5 Deaths at Sea Gripped the World. Hundreds of Others Got a Shrug")

It was the nameless and faceless who perished on that fishing trawler. 

Like the "caravans" that were coming to "invade" America from below our border, these people did not have individual lives or stories. They were dehumanized,  as if they were all but the one tale we had invented for them.

And when that occurs, what we do to them, or what we don't do for them, loses all significance. Their deaths but a statistic. A number on a page. Without emotion. 

When our prejudices and hatreds control our response, when we denounce those who do not neatly fit into our universe, we do not hear their cries for help. For they do not exist. No body, no soul. Nobody. Not in the world we live in.

And so it was for the hundreds who died on the open seas.

As though they never were. Gone without a trace.