Perspektiiviä

The Neverending Story
Imagine if every single day there were headlines in every newspaper in the world and every television show saying: "29,000 children died yesterday from preventable diseases and malnutrition" and then the rest of the stories alternated between detailed personal accounts of families where this devastation was taking place, and sidebar features detailing what was happening in advanced industrial countries, like this: "all this suffering was happening while the wealthiest people in the world enjoyed excesses of food, worried about how to lose weight because they eat too much, spent money trying to convince farmers not to grow too much food for fear that doing so would drive down prices, and were cutting the taxes of their wealthiest rather than seeking to redistribute their excess millions of dollars of personal income." If the story were told that way every day, the goodness of human beings would rebel quickly against these social systems that made all this suffering possible, suffering far, far, far in excess of all the suffering caused by tsunamis and other natural disasters.

WTA Death Watch ja Realtime Death Counter – Tsunamin uhrien määrä on nyt noin 150 000. Saman verran ihmisiä kuolee suunnilleen joka päivä.

Kolmen minuutin hiljaisuuden aikana kuoli 318 ihmistä.

Eikä sillä ole mitään merkitystä, kuolivatko ihmiset "luonnollisista" syistä (kuten tsunamin tai ikääntymisen seurauksena) vai "epäluonnollisista" syistä (kuten oman käden kautta tai väkivallan seurauksena).

150 000 kuollutta on tragedia. 152 640 kuollutta per päivä on tilasto.


Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and await their turn...this is the picture of the condition of man.
- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)