How many deaths does it take?

"One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic" Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin may have been the biggest murder in all time, but that doesn't make him any less right. Human brains cant comprehend the number one million by it self, let alone the complexities in one million deaths. We are however able to fully comprehend one death. We seem to ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead because of the war, yet when one American child dies it becomes our main focus. This is not because we are evil people,but because it would be impossible to feel empathy for every single innocent death. The huge separation between us and those who are in Iraq is also a huge factor. We are more affected the closer a tragedy occurs. But if we put a human face on the tragedy it becomes a little easier, such as the 17 cents a day children,but still not enough to stop our lives like a death of a friend would.

Its my thought that this is just one of our traits we gained by evolution. When we were small nomadic families we werent really affected by the pain of other families and therefor the genes of those with that sort of empathy had no advantage and therefor never became dominate. Empathy was a way of making survival more important and allowed humans to begin WANTING to help each other and therefor have some future support in return. a primitive "I scratch your back you scratch mine"

I think this is why we are so affected when a friend dies, its because we used each others support and we no longer have that support. We lose our help from our friend and we feel like we are alone and have a weak spot that you friend once filled.

well thats just my opinion

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