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Names and Pictures define us, a little too much


I am sure all are aware of last Sunday night’s tragic events in Las Vegas, with the 64 year-old Stephen Paddock sending shockwaves around the world through undoubtedly the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

At the time of writing, the death toll stands at 59, and more than 500 have been injured – a number which will surely lead to changes in American gun laws. If they are not too naïve to realise that they must act.

The event is also another example of how susceptible we are to vitriolic, bloody terrorist attacks (or hate crimes, depending upon your perspective) and how easy it is to forget about these ever-increasing crimes.

Just two days after the massacre, I was scrolling through social media, perhaps oblivious to the severity, when I came across a video. This video showed many of the victims, crucially with names and pictures.

And for the first time since I developed an arguably cynical view that death happens every day, and thus that we should not be shocked when only a small minority perish, it properly got to me.

I don’t want to over-emphasise the emotion that I felt, I wasn’t suddenly grief-stricken or in tears, but it did get me thinking; how much do names and photos affect our feelings?

If I told you that around 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died in The Gulf War of 1990-91, the figure has little meaning. These people, one might think, who are they? Is this true, or is it a statistic exaggerated and brought up to make us feel guilty?

If I mentioned Lee Rigby, the British soldier brutally stabbed to death on the streets of London in May 2013, it is more likely to draw gasps or mutterings from an audience. For this was an Englishman killed, off-duty, inhumanely, on his own streets.

It would be a stretch for me to liken each of the Iraqi soldiers to Lee Rigby, but the point still remains. These are still people in their own right and many of those will have been serving just like Lee Rigby – with the aim of feeding their families.

By logic, we should be 59 times more despondent, or rather shocked, upon hearing of the Las Vegas attack, than we were when hearing about Lee Rigby. That is based off a basic human intuition, that everyone is equal. It seems only right that we care more depending upon the numbers. Yet we do not.

As Josef Stalin reputedly put it, ‘the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.’

But just why is it like this?

The simple explanation would just be to put it down to human emotion. A lot might argue that when you hear of a single death on the news, through whatever source, it takes on more significance as you are exposed to all the details – their life, age, name etc.

Emotions like this aren’t quantitative. The personal connection to one death (or indeed around 60) that we hear about in detail, is a lot higher than the connection between us and 100’000 people hundreds of miles away.

Understandably, anything which has a perhaps more direct threat to us and our society sticks in the forefronts of our mind more easily – recent examples of this are the terrorist incidents such as 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings, plus the ones I have previously mentioned.

And unfortunately, in my opinion, it seems that that feeling is simply inescapable.

I’m not arguing that we should care about every single person when they die, for otherwise we would have death on our minds 24/7, and it is illogical to think anyone would think that – we are all too caught up in our own worlds as it is.

Nor am I suggesting that we should completely disregard the tragic deaths of attacks such as the one in Las Vegas, that would be heartless and disrespectful.

And quite obviously, everyone will mourn the deaths or sufferings of people who are directly present in their lives – family and friends etc.  

But I do think it is important to have some perspective, and although that human emotion is what makes us all so unique, not to let it overcome us to the extent that it warps our views.

Because that would be an extremely sorry neglect of human emotion.

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