EVENT
My own “abstract art.”
The green square on the left represents the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
The adjacent yellow square represents the number of civilian deaths on September 11th, 2001.
The adjacent blue square represents the number of deaths in last weeks tsunami.
Finally, the red square represents the approximate number of deaths last year from starvation worldwide.
My sources were New York Times and BBC archives, the United Nations website, and several others promoting food charities.
Of course, all four of these figures are apalling, and the fact that a thousand deaths is so easily represented by an almost invisible speck should convey a sense of how expensive a world of 6 billion + humans really is.
But following 3 years of fallout on 9/11 and the war and Iraq, and today hearing about the lack of coverage and support given to the tsunami (Yes, it was on all the major networks. No, it didn’t interrupt regular programming) this is a point that is, I think, too little made.
Months go by without any mention in the News (be it Fox, the New York Times, the Economist, or the BBC) of the yearly death of millions of children by starvation. Each year almost nine million people die of starvation. We’re not talking a one-time catastrophe that levels a terrible loss, but an annual catastophe that costs and costs and costs.
The truth is that these four events have an almost inverted amount of attention relative the scale of their destructiveness. And again, I might be accused of being unsympathetic, but virtually every U.S. casualty in Iraq has received some level of national attention. When has a Tanzanian who has died of starvation ever received a letter from the president’s secretary (be it signed by machine or not) or her family granted an international audience?
It will take two weeks to two months for the death toll from famine to outstrip the grimmer tsunami estimates. More people died from starvation on 9/11 than by terrorist attacks to a factor of almost ten.
It will sound like I’m preaching apathy to catastrophe. I’m not.
But I do think it’s a fact, and an important fact, that somehow, as humans or as social creatures, we’re so wired into what strikes us as dramatic (planes hitting buildings and bombs and big waves vs. a slow falling from painful sleep into death) that we send to eschew a more clinical and, yes, objective interpretation of the world.
The advantage of our inclination is that it gives us a spontaneity… the ability to realize something all at once. I don’t think humans would either fall in love or develop such persistent hatred without giving priority to extraordinary states and events.
Nevertheless, objectivity, the ability to clearly and without bias examine something on the basis of its essential qualities alone, is a trait we strive for (even if we do not meet it) in almost all of our activities, from law and science to ethics and aesthetics. That we’ve all over looked the facts by such a margin on the subject of human lives seems more than a glaring error.
~ Connor