9:14 p.m. - 2023-08-16
body count
It's human nature to gauge catastrophic events in terms of a body-count. Perhaps we do this instinctively, trying to assess any future threat to ourselves and our loved ones. Or maybe it's done in an effort to imbue these relentless media-affronts with the narrative weight of human grief....to contextualize the horror within some existential hierarchy of suffering.
But body-counts are meaningless numerators unless the denominator holds real value; for until you acknowledge the worth of one human life, how can you appreciate the death of a hundred?
It's tempting to leave it right there. As an open question, a pithy platitude and a solemn nod. But like all things human, it's never that simple. If our sense of empathy is born of our own experience of loss and suffering; is it for the survivors and bereaved then that we empathize? Or, by extrapolating on our childhood fears and injuries, do we imagine ourselves in the shoes of the victims, as a “numerator” swept away by a tsunami or crushed in an earthquake...force-marched to a mass grave or gunned down alongside our teachers and classmates? Moot distinctions of course, for the victims. For those hashmarks etched forever now on the cell walls of history...for that confetti left trampled after the party lets out early...strain any analogy you want, the corpses remain indifferent.
Which is why assigning “value” to the dead in this context hinges on the value of a single life; the life of a living stranger, and our capacity to ascribe it worth. But fewer things have been more easily (and piously) said (ad nauseam) than done.
Because it's not pragmatic. It's not who we are; culturally or instinctively. Owing, no doubt, to some anthropologically epistemic root-cause...something to do with being omnivorous top-tier predators, maybe? (Why can't we be cool and aloof like bears, then? Why we always acting like sketched-out raccoons?) Regardless, we live where we live, and that's in a world where competition for resources isn't just considered inevitable, but is venerated as a sacrosanct cornerstone of capitalism. This can't help but impact our valuation of the “denominator” in this equation, our appraisal re: the relative worth of a stranger's life...
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Given that it's soot-covered, shit-flecked and littered with syringes, the homeless tip of the disparity iceberg is hard to ignore. We (hi, Pidge) lived across from a homeless camp for a time, and...yeah. My unconditional love for the brotherhood of man was sorely tested. (Most of us have seen the homeless defecate in public, but have you ever seen 'em have sex? Even-less recommended, somehow.) Which certainly raises the empathy-bar; for how do you value the lives of those who've forsaken their own? And it begs the question of the more-prevalent, less-visible suffering that riddles the body of the iceberg itself: who is it you can actually help, at what cost to yourself, and when you (inevitably) can't, must you become numb to it all? For the sake of self-preservation?So yeah, the free market economics of humanity tends to devalue the everyday “worth” of individual lives...much like the celebrity lens of a tragedy tends to inflate it.
Also, since we're discussing the grimy differences between our abstract veneration of bodies counted in the wake of catastrophic events and our more ambiguous daily experience of the population at large, I guess I'll just come right out and say it: some of 'em probably had it coming. And I'm sorry but you know it's true; there's a few motherfuckers out of every hundred tragedy victims that ain't nobody gonna miss. That the world is better off without. I could rattle off a laundry-list of depravity and malice that would give pause to a deathbed priest, but you know what/who I'm talking about. So the question here becomes; how do we reconcile the sweaty, unwashed reality of our shared humanity with some aspirational, abstract veneration of a “stranger's life”? With the moral precept I so blithely posited a few paragraphs ago?
Well it's no simple task, for sure. Because we really do suck as a species. And we disappoint as a rule. So you 're gonna have to factor all of that into the equation...you 're gonna have to let the uncomfortable breadth of your experience inform your qualification/quantification of the denominator. And then let your heart break anyway. And never become jaded.
