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A Single Death Is A Tragedy, A Million Is A Statistic
Posted on 4/8/2009 at 3:09 PM - Post Comment
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. This came from Joseph Stalin, when he was going through the “Great Purge.” And it’s come to be true. When older people died in heat waves in California, you never heard about it. It was just something to apparently be expected. But when a few people died from SARS and a few people just got sick, it was suddenly a huge epidemic. Likewise, people die in car crashes every day. People at war die every day. But the minute a bus full of about 20 students crashes, it is suddenly a national tragedy. There are millions of children kidnapped and murdered each year, well maybe not millions, but you get the idea. But we find the body of Cailey Anthony I think was her name, and it’s this huge drama. I’m not saying that all these deaths are insignificant or that they weren’t tragic. But we pay attention to them, because we think they’re unusual or our news crews think they are unusual, and then we blow them up into this huge thing ignoring everything else, all the other deaths, etc. Likewise, ephedra based diet pills were originally banned not because of the deaths of multiple ordinary citizens as you might think, but rather a few incidents like the death of one major league baseball player at that time. They made their case partly on the backs of ordinary citizens and their experiences with the diet pills. But it was mostly on the deaths of athletes and so on, who were in the public eye. This could very well be why the government has actually banned publication of dead soldiers returning home. They recognize that if the American public gets too emotionally involved, they won’t be able to actually complete their war efforts. Then, you get what happened in Vietnam where all the politicians get involved, and in a way the soldiers themselves get demonized. It was recently lifted, allowing news crews and others to film with the family’s permission. The first was 30 year old Staff Sgt Phillip A Myers. The reality is very few American soldiers have actually been recently killed in combat. Most of the American deaths were caused by mistakes made by our own staff and soldiers. But if you consider all the Iraqi and other citizens who were not actually soldiers and were killed in the crossfire as well as the Iraqi insurgents and soldiers who were killed, our losses are realistically small in comparison. But like Stalin said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
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