Death on a massive scale

As Annie Dillard writes in her article "The Wreck of Time" in Harper's of January 1998

    Was it wisdom Mao Tse-Tong attained when - like Ted Bundy - the awakened to the long view?
    "The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of," Mao told Nehru, "China has many people. . . . The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of." A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China's population.
    Does Mao's reckoning shock me really? If sanctioning the death of strangers could save my daughter's life, would I do it? Probably. How many others' lives would I be willing to sacrifice? Three? Three hundred million?

    An English journalist, observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: "Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other."

    One small town's soup kitchen, St. Mary's, serves 115 men a night. Why feed 115 inidividuals? Surely so few people elude most demographics and achieve statistical insignificance. After all, there are 265 million Americans, 15 million people who live in Mexico City, 16 million in greater New York, 26 million in greater Tokyo. Every day 1.5 million people walk through Times Square in New York; every day almost as many people - 1.4 million - board a U.S. passenger plane. And so forth. We who breathe air now will join the already dead layers of us who breather air once. We arise from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us.

Our instinctive to reaction to warfare is one of repulsion, a response to the tragic loss of human life. However, within each of us lies the susceptibility to engage in similar behavior, just as with murder.

And while we might despise disease, it is obviously not our most immediate concern. Especially in dealing with the third world, curable ailments continue to run rampant. Some argue that perhaps this is nature's way of exacting revenge on a species that has run amok with its resources. Yet this would seem unneeded - we're perfectly capable of extensive self-flagellation.

The numbers give us some sort of persepective on things, but the reality of the number of people who have died before us for any reason is unfathomable. The individual death persists in being the most meaningful, despite incidents that take many at once which we are taught to mourn.

Source: R.I.P.