The Daily Ink

Have you ever tried to wrap your brain around the population of the world? 6.77 billion people (and some change) is a lot to fill your head with all at once. We can’t think of them separately, individually, they are a collective, a statistic. The number of people that died last year in car crashes is a statistic. The 31,447,694 people infected with HIV/AIDs is just another figure. Our world is made up of numbers, some that we want hire and others we work to lower.

Aside from the tiny amount of people we know, we don’t ever really see other human beings. They fill in the slots in our records of births and deaths, and we don’t even realize that they actually exist. It is easy to feel nothing for a number. How can one identify with 395,871 (a number)? People identify with one, with an individual. They can know that something is bad when it happens to a group, but they feel something is wrong when they see it happen to that one person they know.

Because our world is a statistic we let tragety after tragety befall it’s citizens. Because we hide humans behind numbers we don’t see the true extent of things. 6 million jews were killed along with 5 million other groups targetted by the Nazi party. Terrible. But because we didn’t connect with the situation we let it go one for far to long. Had we not seen those dieing as a statistic, but has human lives worth saving  we would have acted much quicker.

Anything can be justified with numbers, but ask what it is doing to just one human life? Then you will have your answer.

Today’s statistics…

Thank you Worldometer for these statistics