When One Child Dies, It’s a Tragedy; When a Thousand Die, It’s a Statistic
When One Child Dies, It’s a Tragedy; When a Thousand Die, It’s a Statistic
You have a monster inside you. A monster that doesn’t care about the suffering of thousands of people. But it does care about the pain of one.
I am fascinated at how desensitized people are about horrible events as long as they happen to masses of people.
Oppenheimer, the movie, has again brought up some heated debates about using nuclear weapons. I am observing people’s reactions and find generally two poles:
The people who find the bombing of Nagasaki na Hiroshima to be an ultimately tragic, terroristic, and barbarian slaughter of innocent civilians. It could have been prevented. It was an act of unspeakable terror to show off a new type of bomb and scare the world into submission.
Those who argue it was logical, strategically sound, and served its purpose. It was for the greater good, and it saved lives. How else would Japan be stopped with less of a cost in life? Not to mention the deterring effect it had on the Soviet Union and the stalemate of superpowers that has held to this day.
I’m not here to argue the validity of both claims, and I find them both reasonable perspectives.
The innocent people of Japan, families, women, and children, were slaughtered in the most gruesome way possible, all to stop a tyrant, their leader, from continuing with his atrocities.
In essence, it was fighting fire with fire. Only the American version of the fire caused generations to suffer from radiation, cancer, and horrible afflictions. Had the Japanese not been stopped, we can only speculate on the horrors they would commit down the line and the potential death toll on all sides. It was a lose-lose situation indeed.
There are no good guys in war — just sides and perspectives.
Normalization of the death of 200,000 innocent civilians.
The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is a great example of how the intentional mutilation and death of innocent men, women, and children is normalized for a greater cause and accepted because it has happened to thousands.
If one person burned a lone family alive and then poisoned their family tree with radiation, ensuring they would suffer for generations, we would all unilaterally see it as a horrible, terrible, unspeakable act of evil. No matter what the leader of that particular family would have done in the past.
But since we’re talking about 200,000 people, give or take a few thousand, it’s just a military strategy to stop a dictator from another country.
What’s fifty thousand dead and mutilated families between nations? That’s right — a statistic.
I noticed a similar pattern with a more recent topic — vaccine side effects.
Talk about poking the bear today, aye? Again, I’m not here to argue who is right or wrong, although my stance on the matter is clear.
If your wife, husband, father, mother, brother, sister, or, God forbid, son or daughter was one of that statistics, you would see it as an unfathomable tragedy and a vile act of ignorance.
Perhaps you would even call it evil. One day your son (insert whoever) is healthy, playing in the field, with absolutely nothing wrong with him, and the other, he is dead or severely injured just because he took a vaccine with a high percentage of severe side effects.
All to prevent him from getting seriously sick or infecting others. You bet on one risk against the other and lost.
The fact is that all vaccines (and medicine in general) have side effects. They vary in frequency and severity, but they all have them. In any group of thousands of people, a few will suffer the worst side effects.
For them, taking the vaccine, or any other medicine, will have been the worst decision they have ever made. Most will survive with various short of long-term consequences, but some won’t. We have accepted these facts and have normalized them.
For those few unlucky individuals, trusting their doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and medical experts will be their last mistake. Some mistakes can’t be fixed. And in our particular case, with vaccines, there are a lot of those people. More than you can possibly imagine.
People read about the side effect being something like one in ten thousand, or whatever, and claim the vaccine a success.
We only kill one in a thousand, or ten thousand, healthy individuals while potentially saving hundreds, or so the story goes.
Collateral damage, right? Who cares about all those dead men, women, and children, anyway. “It’s just math, man.”
Do you think the doctors or nurses think about the possibility that when they’re injecting the person in front of them, they are issuing their death sentence?
Do they feel like murderers when one of the people they injected (or prescribed to) suffers the worst possible consequences and dies? I wonder.
They’re probably numb to this effect. People cope in all sorts of ways.
Perhaps they justify it to themselves with the numbers mentioned above.
It’s for the greater good; they will comfort themselves as they write the obituary of a child that died at their hands.
Maybe they find peace in thinking they did what they believed was right. They were saving lives, just not this one. This baby is a collateral fatality in the name of the greater good.
They might relay the responsibility to their leaders and experts. They were just doing their job.
Where have we heard this before? There is something so familiar about it?
Self-justification tends to do wonders in appealing to one’s soul for committing horrible atrocities, death, and mutilation of others.
I suppose it doesn’t matter whether you are a brainwashed terrorist, a police officer, a soldier, a criminal, or a doctor. You have to find a way to live with yourself.
After all, in your mind, you’re the good guys and believe you are justified in your actions. You’re saving lives, even if you end a few yourself in the process.
When people who are appalled by the side effects of these vaccines, for example, point out that they are effectively killing the people who were least likely to get hurt by the virus, the young and the healthy, the justification is always the same.
Hundreds of millions of people were vaccinated, and millions of lives were saved. So what if a few thousand people die in the process?
It was for the greater good. We eradicated the most horrible diseases in our history with vaccines. They save more lives than they take. It’s science!
Unless it happened to them or their loved ones, then it’s not statistics anymore. It seizes to be an arbitrary number. Then it becomes real.
What if you knew that you would be part of that statistic or your child?
Would it still be worth the risk and benevolent good for all?
Would you sacrifice yourself or your child for the greater good?
I didn’t think so.
I see the same thing happening in conversations about the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
“Putin must be stopped. He invaded a sovereign country, so if it takes millions of lives to stop him, so be it. Otherwise, he might get the idea that he’s allowed to invade other countries, and who knows what will happen next.”
It’s always the same pattern with different names. I like to argue that things aren’t all that simple. They never are in a war. That seems to get people all emotionally riled up. They start talking about right and wrong, ideology and justice, stopping bullies, and whatnot. And I get it. I do.
But people are still dying, and the longer this conflict drags on, the more innocent people will die, and the bigger the danger of the conflict spilling across other borders. It’s just logic and psychology. But that doesn’t matter. Why not?
Because they don’t personally know the people dying in this war, all they see are numbers.
Between two and three hundred thousand people (200,000–300,000) are said to have died on both sides in the past year, thousands have been injured and millions displaced.
The greater the human cost, the more desensitized we become.
If we don’t stop the conflict and a deal, however painful to the ego of both sides, is agreed upon, the odds are overwhelming that there will be a lot more death as a result.
I’ve noticed most people on the outside don’t want the war to end and the killing to stop.
They want to punish Putin.
They want the Russians to suffer for their actions.
They want justice and demand revenge!
They see Russians as evil, power-hungry people who will stop at nothing to restore their former glory. I would call it a projection, but I won’t because it’s just too ironic.
Nevertheless, saving innocent lives and establishing peace is not high on their agenda. I say that if just one family dies for no good reason, it’s too much, and they reply that this is not their problem. Putin can always end the war by retreating.
That is a very emotional and wholly illogical answer. It’s something that’s just not very likely to happen, now is it?
So how about saving some lives by compromising a bit?
“Hell no! The man must pay. Russia must pay. Every inch will be returned! We must stop this evil in its track. Russians are vile creatures and should all perish.”
When I hear such statements from people who I find intelligent, it sends shivers down my spine. The same happened when I saw how people treated the unvaccinated.
As dirt. Unworthy of fundamental rights. Less than animals! We haven’t changed a bit, us humans. Us vs. them that is all we know.
Give us a good scare, pump us with propaganda, and we become mindless killing machines with zero regard for human life whatsoever.
“We should just nuke Moskow and a few other large cities! That will teach those pesky Russians from crossing borders!”
These are almost exact words I’ve heard and read from people on the topic. Good people, not some misanthropic monsters, I don’t think. I’ve thought of it myself when I’ve given into my anger on certain topics. A good nuke or two will teach these assholes a lesson (whoever they may be).
They don’t even know what they’re saying and asking for. They’re just being emotional and reactive.
When I ask them if they believe that all 160 million Russians are evil conquerors, who must be stopped and killed, they look at me like a deer in the headlights.
What have the millions of innocent children, mothers, sisters, fathers, and brothers who are just trying to survive done to deserve their wrath? What do Putin’s actions have to do with some family of five, who they’ll be burning alive in the process? How can they even think, much less say, something like this? They’re wishing for the murder of hundreds of millions of innocent people who have done nothing to them!
It’s because they don’t see individuals and families. They see numbers and ideologies.
They’re Russians, so they’re just a country with some numbers. They must be stopped. It’s not one family being burned alive by their hand, with faces and names; it’s thousands, even millions of families.
Those aren’t people anymore. They’re just nameless statistics.
What if you were held responsible for the atrocities of your government?
You and your family. Guilty by association. How would you feel about that?
When a desperate terrorist blows up a dozen or more people on the street or in a mall, we judge them for killing the innocent. How could they do this? Those were just innocent civilians. Brainwashed monsters! What did they have to do with anything?
But we think and react in the same way.
That person had an axe to grind with your country’s leaders. Perhaps his family was one of those collaterals they killed when bombing his country to punish his country’s leaders. Maybe he just didn’t want your ideals being pushed over his. He then saw all the people of your country as guilty of the crimes your political, intelligence, and military branches have committed. And he delivered the punishment in one loud act of attention-seeking message, written in blood.
How are you any different when you call for attacking and killing another nation, especially its civilian populations?
In fact, one could calculate that one is a bigger monster than the other, but I’ll let you do the math.
We began this article by mentioning a movie, so let us end with one as well.
There is a lot of controversy around the film “Sound of Freedom.”
A story based on true events about a man fighting to save children from human traffickers. I haven’t seen either of the movies at the time of writing, so this is in no way a review or an opinion on the films themselves.
The movie raised awareness surrounding human trafficking and some truly horrifying darkness in our society. I noticed people didn’t want to know that these things were happening, although if we’re being honest unless you’re living in a hole somewhere, you know.
There are monsters out there, most disguised as innocent sheep, living freely among us. We catch a few of these pedophiles and psychopaths every once in a while, thousands every year, in fact, but for some odd reason, they stay under the radar. This movie brought the darkness into the spotlight.
Brilliant marketing or an honest attempt at doing some good in this world — I don’t know.
The fact of the matter is that millions of children are being sold, kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered by these monsters. It’s a whole business, and where there is demand, there will always be supply.
I suppose the movie had an unfortunate timing, as it came out just when attempts were being made to subtly normalize pedophilia as one of those letters of privilege in the West. Or maybe it was just the right time to stop this particular darkness before it became acceptable in society.
I am all for personal freedom and liberal expression, but I draw the line with children and animals.
Here we see the same pattern. We all love our children and fear for their lives constantly. They are the innocent and the fragile that we must protect with our lives.
If such a horrible thing happened to our child, or someone we know personally, it would have destroyed us. But since we hear about these incidents from afar, they happen to other people and occur in mass; we are desensitized. We don’t care.
When we hear that a pedophile ring was brought down, fifty people were arrested, and we found thousands upon thousands of video evidence of child exploitation, it’s just numbers. These numbers are so huge that they leave us cold instead of filling us with rage.
These kids aren’t innocent people anymore. They’re just numbers and terrible statistics.
The media know this very well, and they play on your emotions.
Next time you notice a news crew apparently waste time interviewing individuals with sad stories and teary eyes within the scope of a larger tragedy, remember this lesson.
They are preying on your emotions and know damn well you don’t care about some arbitrary numbers. You only care about real people, touching stories, and teared-up faces.
If they report that 100,000 thousand people have died in an earthquake, you’ll shake it off. Yes, it’s a tragedy, but this is just a number now. You can’t even comprehend what it actually means.
But when they close in and show you that one child who is trapped under the ruins and his father devastated at the loss of his child, holding on to his little motionless hand from above, that’s when it hits you.
This one in one hundred is not just a number, a statistic. It’s a human being made of flesh and bones, just like you and I. It could have been your child.
We are all susceptible to the desensitizing effect of large numbers.
The purpose of this article wasn’t to argue any side of the examples mentioned above. My intention was to remind ourselves that we, too, are susceptible to the desensitizing effect of large numbers when it comes to tragedy. It’s a commentary and a cautionary tale about human nature.
Sometimes it’s wise to stop and reevaluate our beliefs and perceptions.
A nation is composed of individuals. Any group is not one organism. When talking about consequences in large numbers, we’re talking statistics, but behind those statistics are personal tragedies.
These numbers have names: Mike, Sasha, Frank, Marie, Julio, and Ivan. They have faces, desires, and personalities. They dream, and they work hard to achieve those dreams. They love and are loved. They are fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters.
Remind yourself of this fact next time your making conclusions when looking at a large number of people in any statistic or plan. Notice how little you care when millions of people are in question.
The larger the tragedy, the less you feel.
Isn’t that interesting?
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