Did you hear about the vacation boat that sank in Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, killing twelve sleeping tourists and their Vietnamese tour guide?  Awful, just awful.  Boat took less than a minute to sink, people screaming as they went to their watery graves.

That’s the kind of stuff I read about, day in, day out.  Y’know, if it bleeds, it leads.

The story was in Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle (yes, I still subscribe to an honest-to-god paper newspaper; I’m also on AOL; and I sometimes listen to music on a compact CD player when I walk the dog.  And it’s not because I’m, let’s just say, comfortably past 30, it so happens I want to do my part to save dying American industries.  But that’s a topic for another time).

Also in Friday’s paper: military forces killed three protestors in Bahrain.  Like the folks on the boat, they, too, were asleep.  Ouch.  Rough.

Here’s what I didn’t read in Friday’s paper:

“Agency faulted after girl dies, twin is burned.”

The article included a picture of a man with the caption: “Jorge Barahona, who was found doused in gasoline, told police he was trying to kill himself.”

For the purpose of writing this blog, I forced myself to skim the article and in the third paragraph read something about a ten year old girl wrapped in a plastic bag.  That was enough.  I turned the page.

I also didn’t read “Neighbors honored for saving dog.”

Now why?  Why wouldn’t I read this one?  Here’s a story you know has a happy ending, but still I couldn’t read it.  Why not?  I couldn’t read it because the article contained a photograph of the dog and the caption “Pit bull Blueberry’s beatings were caught on tape by neighbors.”

Again I skimmed – something about his bloody frame lying against the bars of his apartment balcony, shivering – and stopped.  That was enough.

It’s the Benji Effect.

I don’t even clearly remember the Benji movies, but I am certain that I cry far more easily when animals are hurt – even if it’s fictitious – than when adults are abused, maimed or killed.  I blubbered like a baby at the end of Marley and Me when they put the dog down.  The end of say, No Country for Old Men, not so much.

I’m not completely emotionally defective, however.  As I hope you noticed above, I also fall apart when human beings under the age of 18 are harmed.

It’s the innocence of the animals and of the children.

Even though those sleeping tourists on that boat did nothing to deserve their death, they were adults, which means they must have some experience with grown up things like duplicity, calculation and sin.  Therefore, it was more okay for them to die than the ten year old girl.  It was even more okay for them to die than for the dog to get abused.  Not “okay” okay, but okay in the sense that I can take reading and thinking about it for a moment without it casting a pall on my morning.

Not so the child and animal abuse stories.  Children and animals don’t understand evil, and they shouldn’t have to.  Children, of course, will come to understand it quickly enough, the moment some bully steals their toy dump truck out of the sand box, but, still, for me, I can’t stand to see that innocence lost.

And if I so much as put my dog through the trauma of cutting his nails (and believe me, it’s more traumatic for me than him), he looks at me with hurt eyes while I hold him down, as if to say, “Why, daddy, why?”

God, I’m tearing up just thinking about it, so I better stop here and distract myself – oh, here’s something:

“Two Men Arrested in 2009 Slaying.” Some 22 year old guy, a native of Guatemala, was shot to death in the courtyard of his apartment.  Turns out the two suspects mistook him for the man they really wanted to kill.  Boy, talk about bad luck.  Well, that’s life in the big city.  Toodaloo!