Tragedy, Mathematics, 9/11, Justice
Let’s start here with the premise that any time an innocent person is killed, this is a tragedy. The tragedy is that they were innocent—irregardless of nationality, ethnicity, religious bent, cultural bent, sexual orientation, sex, title, physical appearance, and so on. If we believe, in any sort of way, that ‘we are all God’s children” then I guess all lives matter. We’ll put aside here Will Rodger’s observation that if you shot 10 people at random, probably 8 out of 10 of them deserved to be shot for something. Sometimes, when I have gotten the short stick in life, I remind myself that there are also times when I deserved the short stick but instead got the longer stick. Others may not have been so lucky.
9/11 stands out as a glaring tragedy, a horrible way for innocent people to die, a horrible way for most anyone to die. And most of us saw it right before our eyes on TV. I rarely get up early mornings, but I did that day as I had an appointment with my car mechanic to do something with my car. So I saw everything as it happened on the TV in his waiting room. It was shocking to the point of unbelievability. And we, as Americans, can’t really ever forget this tragic event. How could we possibly do so?
Putting it all in perspective is just as unnerving. We, as a nation, were so shocked, that we have spent billions of dollars trying to insure it doesn’t happen again. For the most part, we have succeeded——however, not in stopping terroristic acts, but just forcing them to happen elsewhere like in theaters, malls, schools. The incidence of terrorism is rising exponentially. Somebody, somewhere, most weeks now, shoots another dozen people at random for either mental, political, or religious motives. We feel frustrated that we are becoming numb to it all, just another day at the office. The unthinkable has become a global fad. More and more of us are beginning to feel like some sort of young ghetto gang member: we kind of know we, or certainly many others, could possibly die from some sort of grotesque event beyond our control, but rationalize that it will be the next generation that pays the piper. Well, that’s our hope. The best a young gang member can hope is that it is the gang member next to him whose time is up. Are these young gang members brave? Probably not, they merely have accepted life for them is just to be the way it is.
Whenever a particular innocent person is innocently killed it is a personal tragedy. After that we tend to measure tragedy by the numbers. We count the bodies. If 10 people die that is noteworthy, if 100 people die it is a tragedy, if 1000 people die that is a catastrophe. If certain people we don’t like die that is a misfortune. Exactly what should be done about the killing of innocent people depends, sadly, on who these innocent people are. If I personally take out some perceived ‘bad’ person or at least a member of a ‘bad’ group, that is murder and can be tried in court. If I join a military, political, or religious ‘army’ of dedicated patriotic or religious ‘soldiers’ and our side kills thousands of ‘bad’ people in some sort of battle, blessed by no shortage of clergy on both sides, well—glory be to God, or at least to the ‘flag’. The logic at some point gets pretty discombobulated and the justification pretzelized.
The 9/11 atrocity killed roughly 3000 people. The culprits were all foreigners. Most of them were Saudis, but they are our ally so we attacked Iraq. We spent billions to see that it doesn’t happen again, or seldom. In 1913 there were 13,716 homicides in the United States—Americans killing Americans by more than 4 times the number killed in 9/11. Interestingly, murders and crime in general decreased substantially in the 1990’s. Death by murder has fallen to about the rate it was in 1960. Weirdly, our response to this decline has been to relax gun restriction laws so that most people can pack a gun. It is too early to see where this leads. Anyway, there are still 4.5 times as many people murdered by our own citizens in one year than were murdered in the 9/11 attacks.
6.1 million people die each year in the world from treatable diseases. On a personal basis each of these deaths is as tragic as each death in the 9/11 attacks. These were preventable deaths, but 6.1 million is apparently not yet at the threshold level to cause any great outrage. Of course we don’t watch them expire right before our eyes like the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps we should——put 24 hr TV cameras, for example, on dying refugees so we can, at any hour of day or night, watch the last flicker of life pass from their eyes. We are so angry about the 3000 innocents killed in 9/11 and yet 6.1 million deaths is hardly on our minds at all. Well, Americans are not directly killing these millions of people. In the U.S. 44,789 people die from lack of health insurance/health care. That is more than 10 times the number of people who died in 9/11. We have reacted strongly to this situation and the battle still rages as to whether these people deserve adequate health care. Between 1877 and 1950 roughly 4,000 blacks were lynched in the U.S., yet Congress was never able to pass any anti-lynching laws. Filibusters have always prevented it and today the practice is not common enough to warrant all the fuss.
France, Japan and Australia rated best, and the United States worst, in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday. If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.” WOW, so us Americans could prevent 100,000 deaths of our own citizens via better health care for all citizens. That is 33 times the number of Americans who died in the 9/11 attacks. I suppose, if these hapless, poor, often mentally limited losers can’t afford health insurance, they got what they deserved. I guess. Pets of course, do matter. Our own families do matter. Our religious affiliation matters. A lot of things matter to us, varied in nature, but death from treatable diseases from those outside our immediate world do not, I guess.
43 million people in the world have been forced to flee their homes across the world because of conflict in their country. That is 13 million more people than lived in the U.S. in 1860. Wow! In 2007 there were 4 million displaced Iraqis across the globe. They are not dead, just mostly dead weight and a burden to their host country. 50,000 Iraq refugees landed in the United States. What happened to the glorious invasion of Iraq which would generate democracy, freedom, and prosperity for the Iraqii people? Instead we generated a country run by religious thugs, few basic amenities, guns all over the place, and no safety for anyone practically anywhere. Imagine if some ‘enemy’ attacked us and forced 4 million of us to flee and left the rest of us in the same pot as current day Iraqi citizens. I was never a fan of Bush, but thank God no one invaded us to save us from Bush and left us in such a state as he left Iraq. So many things are relative. I’ll take Bush any day, and I suspect most Iraqiis would vote Hussein back in. How sad so many situations are. The 4 million Iraqi refugees are at least alive, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis are dead from the conflict. I know, if we shot 10 Iraqis at random, 8 of them probably deserved to be shot for something.
The point here is this. So many people are being tragically killed across the globe that the 3000 we lost on 9/11 pales by comparison. We focus on these 3000, we watched them die. All these other deaths of innocent people for various preventable reasons are not right in our face, just like so many fellow Americans, whose bad environments are unimaginable and they are essentially gated off, out of our sight.
There are roughly 40,000 suicides in the United States every year. That’s 13 times the number of deaths in the 9/11 attack. It would be hard to say how many of these suicides are preventable but it is sad enough to think so many people feel so bad about their life that they commit suicide. We like to think how civilized the world has become. What we really mean is that for some of us, we live in the best of all possible worlds, and for far many others, they live in the worst of all possible worlds. Reality is simply not something we can process in our minds without becoming depressed. This whole musing is depressing. Should we all feel personally guilty because we are not even remotely grieving for these millions of tragedies as much as we grieve over those who died in 9/11? Are things really getting better or are we, like lemmings, simply mindlessly racing, mob-like, towards an evolutionary cliff, and there then be another hundred thousand year correction period for the evolutionary process?
There is little use to proceed with this musing. There are countless other mass tragedies of one sort or another that could be detailed here, but this would be superfluous. Most of us are isolated off, and immune from so many of the tragedies happening, or coming down the pike on all of us—all countries, all religious groups, all ethnic groups, all males and females—all now living in a global community, even though we pretend our own little country can be self sufficient, self protecting, and everybody live happily, secure at home, prospering as a country on our own. Unfortunately, all the really huge problems coming at us from every direction are global.
Progress, in many ways, is making all of us less powerful, as individuals or groups, to protect the innocent. More and more we are circling the wagons, not so much just families, communities, or nations anymore, but cyberspace groups of all sorts with a global base. If I don’t like some particular group, on most any basis, I can go online and hook up with others who detest the same ilk of people. The tide is turning. Atomic bombs and smart missiles are no match these days for non-uniformed soldiers armed with endless opportunities for terroristic acts. And, it can be a soldier of one. The ingredients are falling in place for chaotic violence perpetrated by those who feel they have nothing to lose. They are willing to die, and just want take others with them and make those associated with their victims feel the pain they feel regarding their own lives. Weapons of mass destruction are now available and more likely to be legal than anytime in the past. An Uzi is certainly a weapon of mass destruction. A home-made bomb is certainly a weapon of mass destruction. Responsible reproduction is off the table for political and religious reasons, but armed assassinations are rising exponentially, and it is hard to pinpoint where the point of no return starts with the subsequent mass of global thugs, all well armed, roaming the earth to help control human overpopulation. Of course this can’t happen, it did’t in Germany, or Rwanda, or the Sudan, or Iraq, or Somalia, or Haiti, or the Ukraine, or Vietnam, and isn’t, we blindly see, beginning to happen in probably dozens of countries across the globe right now. I see, said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw.
It might seem a bit unrealistic, as well as very self-serving, to really believe particular families are favorites of God. Whatever the creative basis for human existence, diversity stands out as a major part of human existence. The notion that the human species is a favorite of God and our species has been given dominion over all other species and the earth’s natural resources is really over the top when considering this is totally a human conceived baseless hypothesis. There is no good reason to equate most advanced with most favored. When somebody treats our pet badly, we are not calmed down by a response by the perpetrator that it’s just dog or cat or horse or whatever. We have, in some sense of the word, created our offspring—but that is the totality of our creations. God, via the evolutionary process governed by his laws, has created millions of ‘offspring’ and it would be more reasonable to suspect he is proud of all these created species. It is not evident at all that the prophets in every major religion ever pushed any ‘family values’ in the same manner many religious people do today. What prophet ever spent time doting over their offspring? None, to my knowledge. Creating children comes with it the responsibility to raise them well. A job well done here is a job done, a job completed. Thereafter, the ethical responsibility toward all humanity is the same and all the prophets have made this clear as does the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule does not say “Do unto your offspring as you would have them do unto you. Everyone else is secondary.”
To the extent the above paragraph is truly ethical, then the human (and other species/natural resources) preventable human tragedies are all, on equal footing, tragedies. To support, for example, a system in which the affluent communities pay for their schools via property taxes, and poor communities pay for their schools via property taxes, is inherently unethical. All children deserve good schools. All children deserve good health care. And all people deserve good employment opportunities, decent wages, decent pensions, and so on. Their is nothing admirable about any self-serving drive to make sure just our own offspring get any of these things. Neglecting some, in favor of others, ends up imploding an entire society, and history has demonstrated this over and over and over. The endless and numerically large tragedies occurring across our planet today are all essentially happening because humans do not accept the need for responsible reproduction, for protecting the environment and others species, for ensuring all people, regardless of their talents or genetic advantages, have a level playing field and opportunity to develop whatever talents they do have, or for providing good schools, good health care, decent wages which rise automatically with the cost of living, good pensions, and of course, basic rights for all people.
We are not really that far from the perfect cast for the next World War that will dwarf all others. Let’s imagine the following world leaders:
Donald Trump, President of the U.S.
Sarah Palin, Vice-President of the United States
Ted Kruz—Majority Leader of the House
Vladimir Putin—President of Russia
Ali Khamenei—Supreme Leader of Iran
Kim Jong-un—Supreme Leader of North Korea
Benjamin Netanyahu——Prime Minister of Israel
The ISIS mob
The Tea Party
Pat Robertson—Chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network.
Anthony Scalia as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Dick Cheney—Secretary of Defense.
How is that for an assemblage of faith-based warriors? Were all these notables to fall in place as above, would the bombs fly before or after one week? Fortunately Mother Nature is a permanent player in the evolutionary process, and no matter the implosion or damage—afterward, Mother Nature imposes another evolutionary correction which often lasts hundreds of thousands or millions of years, following which the ‘correction’ evolution evolves better and stronger that ever. Why doesn’t his cheer us up?
For all our human intelligence, we are fumbling the ball for our future. In an abstract way we understand the Golden Rule; in practice we all too often abandon it for purely self serving feelings. And in the end, this brings tragedy to all members of the human race, not just the increasing many who we allow to endure living in the worst of all possible worlds, while others live in the best of all possible worlds. These worlds are more and more colliding across the globe, as well as within our own society—with implosion of civilized living erupting in so many ways in so many places. It is not a pretty sight, and individually we begin to feel more and more helpless. As our helplessness grows, so does our tendency to circle the wagons about our own groups of various natures. Alas, the more we look out for ourselves, and those like us, the worse the situation gets. Right now differing groups fight for a bigger piece of the pie, but in the process the pie itself is shrinking except for a few who have managed to hoard most of the pie for themselves. Greed is always self destructive. Compulsive behaviors never lead to contentment. Whenever this situation develops the Haves, with much to protect, are always toppled by the Have-nots, with nothing to lose. Thus, the permitted greed of the few, enables them to destroy themselves along with everyone else, and the evolutionary process goes back to the drawing board. Oh well, for many of us, what we are creating in evolutionary Time will not impact fully on those of us departing on human Time. I guess many of us may die in a nick of time.
