Death, Statistics and Compassion

Every diary.  OK, I'll come back later.  Almost every dairy!  Virginia Tech!  The necessity of gun control.  The absurdity of gun control.  Bush in Virginia.  Bush speaking!  Why am I reading this?  Come back later...oh god...more diaries.  Why am I reading this?  What is the matter with you people?

About 35 thousand human beings -- every one a universe, every single farking one of them just like you or me -- die every day of starvation.  http://www.starvation.net/ A lot of that -- at least from where I sit -- is preventable.  

Iraq body count estimates about sixty thousand civilians have died http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ -- others suggest upwards of 700,000.  These are just people, though they aren't enrolled in any American universities.  Do we care?  Not so much.  It's certainly not a terrible, terrible tragedy like, oh, some nutjob shooting 30 classmates.  

For that matter -- never mind moral agency at the moment -- something around  forty thousand people die every year on the highway.  That's a lot of dead people -- so many that small innovations in safety, or giving up SUVs, would probably save a LOT more than thirty people.

Don't get me wrong -- every death is a tragedy.  Anywhere.  Even the shooter's death.  It's a fucked up rotten world where someone would be so miserable and isolated that they'd think killing 30 human beings is all right, or the only thing left to their imagination.  But this is not the foundation of a public policy based on compassion, or even expedient good sense.  Public policy is -- or should be -- about how groups of people act, how legislation and enforcement and social programs change the nature of society.  One shooter -- or three airplanes, for that matter -- do not do change society by themselves, nor does moral handwringing about it help people live a better life, nor does fear change society for the better.  All it does, as near as I can tell, is make us feel more righteous, and provides a false sense of community -- one that ignores great problems and magnifies small ones.  And god knows America needs more of that.

So why the hell am I writing this, you ask?  I can read the "delete this diary" now...and the answer is simple.  I want us to remember what's right, and this isn't right.  Orgies of sentiment over very real, but comparatively small tragedies distract our time and energy and care from tragedies which -- in the eyes of history eventually and the poor right now -- define us.  Buying into and perpetuating sentiment about thirty people -- however honest -- while thirty to forty million die for lack of aids medication -- http://www.who.int/...  -- is grotesque.  It feels, honestly, like it defines us as monsters.  And we're not monsters.  We're caring, decent human beings, most of us.  I see how we respond to each other, to problems other Kossacks have in this loose knit, online community -- to the way some of us work so hard to share our hardest stories, to educate each other, to teach and learn and inform -- and we're better than this.  

I have to go out for a bit so won't be able to respond to all flames -- and honestly I'm afraid a tip jar would get me rated right off -- but this is heartfelt.  I hope you'll think about it, rant and all.