errorlevel.org

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." -- Joseph Stalin

In times of peace, people are valuable because they are people. They are humans and human life is important. When in the course of events many people start dying, a sort of dehumanizing takes place. We begin not to look at people as being people anymore. We no longer feel the same compassion for one death.

When people are dying left and right, like in Iraq, what is left is a void. This is a void of humanity. To cope with so many deaths, eventually these things laying on the side of the road after an IED attack are no longer dead people. They are not even bodies, but are objects. And the concern is no longer on the families affected by the tragic loss, but how to move these things out of the way so that what remains of life can continue.

It is not that these deaths are any less important. We avoid mourning for so many people because we must: to stay sane, to maintain normality in our own lives, to reduce our living to the narrow sphere around which our lives are based so that the outside world does not impede our happiness.

To bring us out of this downward spiral, we need to start feeling again. We need to become outraged at every single death. We must allow this outrage to build, and to motivate to action. We must view every death that happens, whether at the hands of a crazed gunman in America, or at the hands of the American military in Iraq, as a tragedy, as a call to action, and as a reason for change for the better.

These people shall not have died in vain. Their lives were not worthless. If anything, their lives are the cost of progress, of motivating a numb, complacent society to the point of action.