This is mainly spawned by the recent tsunami in Asia, however it's something that has been bothering me for a long time. I first noticed this when the Columbine High School shooting happened. That event was talked about endlessly, much more attention was given then should have been. The death toll was 15. When I argued that many times that many people die every minute of every day I got no where. This made me wonder what it was about these deaths that made them so much more important than "normal" deaths.
Some would say that these are children, or that they could be prevented. Well a child dies from hunger every 5 seconds. So a "Columbine" happens every 1 minute 15 seconds, over and over 24/7, and that is just from hunger. Certainly hunger is preventable. If even a 100th of what any major news outlet spent on covering the Columbine thing was spent on feeding kids that were starving they could have easily kept 15 kids alive.
So again I must ask why were these Columbine deaths so much more worthy? Really the only thing I can see is that they are close to home, and odd. People are dying from hunger all the time, so it's something we've grown to ignore.
Next major event I want to talk about is the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Less than 5,000 people died here. Many times that many people die every day from various other sources. Although I don't really have as much a problem with the media coverage here, what I did have a problem with was the few million dollars paid out to each family of someone who died. $38 billion was paid out in the end. That money prevented the deaths of 0 people. Now imagine how many people that could have feed, that will starve to death otherwise. Imagine how much penicillin that would buy to cure diseases that are little more than a annoyance for us, but a serious cause of death for others.
Shortly after this money was paid something else happened. The families of the Oklahoma City bombing sued for this money. They had been paid a few thousand each, yet these others were getting three orders of magnitude more than that. I don't know or care if they won, because it leads to my question of who deserves to get a few million for a loved one dying and who doesn't?
Now the newest thing, this tsunami. The latest death toll is about 150,000. Quite a bit, that's for sure. But about 700,00 people die from heart disease every year, in the US alone. Yet look at all the money common citizens are donating to the tsunami. Also as with all three of these events this money is being spent after the fact, it's not bringing anyone back to life. Sure it should help stop the spread of disease in the area, but most the money will end up being spent on rebuilding the area. So why isn't there a constant outcry for money to be donated into research that would actually help save lives? About 3 million people die from AIDS a year, even if we peg the final death toll from this at 250,000, that is still 1/12 the amount of people dying from AIDS. It's as if one of these tsunamis hit each and every month. And again, that is just from one source of death, AIDS. About 5 million children die of malnutrition every year. I like using the hunger here, because you could argue that AIDS could end up being incurable, and that all the money put into it is wasted, but you can't say that money spent on buying food that feeds somebody and keeps them from dying is wasted.
In the end I don't care. People die, it's what we do. But what gets me is making a big deal about nothing. Talking about this death toll as if it's so unthinkable, when twice this number of kids under 5 years old starve every month. How every site has a little donate link, yet a month ago they couldn't care less about the people dying of simple very curable diseases.
If someone dies and I didn't know them, I don't care. You may say I'm cold, but you can't say you feel bad for each person that dies. So I refuse to elevate some people's deaths above others. Why do you care about random people in Asia, yet you live your life happily ignoring random people in Africa? At least I admit I don't care. I guess the way you deal with ignoring the huge amount of easily prevented death is by making such a big deal out of relatively little amounts of death like this.
If you are going to donate money, doesn't it make more sense to donate to preventing death, rather than to some place where death has already happened?
SOURCES:
All data came from here.
I didn't really search for good data, just whipped this up on a whim. I didn't try to find numbers that further helped my point. I didn't take the highest numbers I could find, in fact I usually rounded them down a bit. I'm sure some of this is not totally accurate, but I didn't make any of it up. If you doubt any of those numbers do some researching.
