The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

The cost of lost lives

Adapted from a recent post of mine at PeoplesForum.com...

I don't look at lost lives as a numbers game. I think as soon as you start talking about dead folks in the thousands, or whatever type of abstract that takes it away from one dead person who had a real life and a story, then you're not getting any kind of useful sense of what the impact of those dead lives were. I used a rough calculus lately to compute how many people might be feeling distinctly un-liberated by this war: total number of dead Iraqis x 5 or so (probably more). It's obviously simplistic, but it does touch a little upon the point I'm making here, which is that the loss of each life there has real, in-person, on the ground effects in the lives of many others. It's not some statistical thing...it's thousands of individual situations, each with a unique impact and consequence. The loss of a cleric, or a teacher, or a community leader or inspiration, for example, has profound rippling effects.

Think of 100 7-year-old Iraqi kids who had a really great teacher that inspired them and was a big part of their daily lives. If that teacher got killed by a stray bomb -- or worse, was one of those poor folks in that shot-up van -- each of those 100 kids is impacted with a hardcore tragic shift in their lives, one that will ultimately probably impact everything that comes after for them. And any person who added value in one area probably added it everywhere they went -- with their family, their friends, their barber, etc.. And all of those folks will have a personal, individual reaction to their loss.

The starkest way to look at it is to think of any of the people from history who have made huge and crucial differences -- MLK, Ben Franklin, Hellen Keller, Mother Jones, Tom Edison, whoever -- and imagine that they were one of some anonymous civilian death count, 20 years before they did their thang.. No one would ever connect "5 people were killed in a suicide bombing" with the fact that electric lighting was delayed ten years, or the non-triumph of the civil rights movement, or of millions of people not being helped by Ben's autobio or Poor Richard's Almanac...but that's the reality that would have been behind such a statistic if it had occured. It's practically a cliche, but it's also true, that one of the 1000+ Iraqi civilians who have been killed might have been the person who would have found the cure for AIDS.

This isn't meant to argue that 100,000 deaths isn't worse than 10,000 or whatever, and of course the same is true for all the folks Saddam is responsible for killing or ruining...I guess this is just a bit of a rant against the de-personalizing (and thus distorting) effect of talking about casualties dead people in terms of numbers. It's not about the numbers, it's about each of the lives.

One simply cannot begin to calculate the real impact of 10,000 deaths, or even 1,000 deaths. Or even one death, when you get right down to it.