106 // for those who will sit and wait for sunday to be monday
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
-- Joseph Stalin
Aside from the horrifying insight this gives into the way Stalin's mind worked, this is such a perfect summary of the view of the Middle East from the nosebleed seats in America. When they occasionally highlight a specific soldier's death, you might feel a pang of sympathy for the family, maybe a little bit of gratitude for the sacrifice, but when they list the number of soldiers that died in Iraq in the last month or the number of casualties from yet another suicide bomb, it does feel like just another statistic. It's sad but it doesn't really evoke emotion because you've heard it ten thousand times before. We become desensitized. The violence becomes a normal routine. And I'm not suggesting that we start feeling horrible over everything that happens. In a certain sense, we can't. We have to go on living and if it doesn't effect us directly there's not a lot we can do about it. But I think there has to be a certain amount of concern when we realize there's enough violence going on every day for us to become desensitized to it.
-- Joseph Stalin
Aside from the horrifying insight this gives into the way Stalin's mind worked, this is such a perfect summary of the view of the Middle East from the nosebleed seats in America. When they occasionally highlight a specific soldier's death, you might feel a pang of sympathy for the family, maybe a little bit of gratitude for the sacrifice, but when they list the number of soldiers that died in Iraq in the last month or the number of casualties from yet another suicide bomb, it does feel like just another statistic. It's sad but it doesn't really evoke emotion because you've heard it ten thousand times before. We become desensitized. The violence becomes a normal routine. And I'm not suggesting that we start feeling horrible over everything that happens. In a certain sense, we can't. We have to go on living and if it doesn't effect us directly there's not a lot we can do about it. But I think there has to be a certain amount of concern when we realize there's enough violence going on every day for us to become desensitized to it.