Recently, I wrote about the power of words. their ability to cause either genuine harm or bridge the divide between opposing views. Numbers have their own power as well, to give shape to ideas and facts that might be difficult to comprehend otherwise. In the preface to his compilation, Annals of the Former World, author John McPhee observes however, that any number followed by a string of zeros simply fails to convey the immensity of geologic time. Even reciting some number like 4 trillion years is so far beyond human dimension as to be meaningless. Big numbers like these do not compute when our lifetimes are measured in decades.
A recent tweet by a notoriously idiotic politician shrugged at the deaths of nearly six and a half million from the Covid pandemic, suggesting that people die all the time. As stunningly callous as that remark is, in some ways it reflects our inability to relate to tragedy writ large, to shocking events and incalculable harms quantified by a statistic that just two years ago we could not imagine. Headlines often rely on these shocking numbers as a tool to capture our attention, but in truth it is only when we hear the story of a single individual that we tend to take matters to heart. Only then, are we able to extrapolate from that deeply personal experience the millions of such stories of men, women and children who have lost their lives to what some describe as a fake disease, or an engineered plot to alter the world order, and a hundred equally nonsensical things.
And yet, we read with mounting concern and shared grief still more numbers that describe the arc of the war in the Ukraine. Thousands of, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, mothers, children senselessly murdered; tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and sailors sacrificed at the altar of faded glory. The numbers grow daily, a caption to images of bombed out cities and towns even as we are told the cost in other terms; billions of dollars. What do these numbers mean to us in our country? Do the measures of lives lost, homes and communities destroyed, the real costs of war intrude on our ordered lives or are we consumed by the rising numbers we are paying at the gas pump, and the grocery store? It isn’t a rhetorical question, we are inundated with facts, statistics, numbers that chronicle the tragic, disheartening and inhumane but their power to affect us too often comes down to the personal.
Well, here is something personal to ponder. More US soldiers died on our shores in the US Civil War than any other in our history, over 620,000. In WWI 405,000 men and women sacrificed their lives, 116,000 in WWII, 37,000 in Korea and 58,000 in Vietnam. But while we are reflecting on these numbers we should be reminded of the impact on humanity world wide. 20 Million soldiers and civilians died in WWI, the best estimates for World War II put it somewhere between 70-85 Million. Vietnam, Korea and all the horrific conflicts since added together number fewer than the current loss of life from the Covid pandemic.
I recite these numbers for several reasons. First to help my fellow Americans with some context, to understand the cost of war and especially our own civil war. The entire US population at that time, both free and slave, was just about 30 million. The US population at the time of the first world war was over 100 Million, and during WWII, more than 130 Million. To be clear, the greatest loss of American lives occurred not in any foreign war but in our own civil war when over 2 percent of the entire population of our country perished. So, when irresponsible politicians, militias, right wing nationalists and equally deranged people hint darkly about a new civil war let them think carefully about just exactly what they prophesy for our fragile democracy.
I am mindful that we have been blessed by our good fortunes not only by our prodigious resources but also by the degree to which we have been spared the awful destruction of two world wars. We sent our young men to fight and to die on foreign shores for those precious freedoms that once represented our foundational values; liberties that get lip service from self described patriots who have never known what it means to pay the terrible price of war. Those who speak of a third world war have no idea of what they portend, they cannot imagine the terrible outcome.
When I read the latest dispatches from the Ukraine I am filled with grief for those on both sides who have lost their lives, and especially for the families that have been torn apart, lost their homes, in some cases their children. They are more than numbers, more than a scorecard in this latest human atrocity. And for those in our country who are busying themselves with the political calculus of who is in the right in this conflict let me just say that such calculations have no place in any debate. We are witnesses to the destruction of life in the Ukraine, in Ethiopia, in Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Syria, Libya and more. The only cause to which we should be dedicated is peace, the only acceptable number of conflicts is none. On this day, irrespective of one's faith or nationality, we must stand together, heads bowed and pray to be rescued from ourselves.
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