Death

This started after seeing this as a statement about the death penalty and the emotion that keeps it in existence, then it got really serious, so I reworked it... A couple months later, and now Sen Kennedy has died and it again seems apropos so I'll go ahead and post it. It is not complete but is sufficient for now.

Life and death is always a heavy topic. On a pulled back, big picture view of things, no one person makes a sufficiently significant impact that their absence would create a vacuum. To look to individuals who have made large impacts in our history is somewhat misleading, as we cannot see the world as it could have been without them, and while it is possible if not likely that no other would have filled the role, it would not, as we would know it, matter.

But we do not judge life in such a grand view fashion. We judge life as the value of those closest to us--that is, we say life is invaluable. We react with horror to the deaths of complete strangers because we put ourselves in the situation. We imagine if a friend, lover, parent, or child had suffered such a fate and we empathize. The more easily we can imagine a particular tragic event, the more strongly we will associate. Most Americans will not ever know the suffering that comes from being unable to get drinking water, and so the millions of lives lost to that are foreign. Hunger is similar in our inability to relate. On the other end most Americans either have flown or had a close friend or family member fly, so when a plane goes down we are more involved, we want to know what happened so we can feel safe from something that could happen to us.

This goes a long way to explaining why billions of dollars are spent in making air travel safer, but only a handful of us send a few bucks a year to help provide clean water to others in the world.

Death is part of life. We are curious and terrified. We wish to see it but be hidden and protected from it.