5.12 Earthquake
Many have written about how difficult it is for humans to understand numbers without everyday meaning. We can put into context 10, 100, even 1,000, but things get hard us for when we hit numbers without reference points in our daily lives.
Before it was Innumeracy was a book, Ronald Reagan noted the phenomenon manifesting in response to speeches. He could talk about how a particular piece of legislation had saved $7.4 million and people would hardly respond. But if he talked about how a bill saved $324,000 the crowed would applaud enthusiastically.
Sadly, the same is true with human tragedy.
From early reports of 10,000 dead, eventually rising to 50,000, then 60,560, now 69,016… It’s hard to put something like the earthquake in China into perspective because (thankfully) it’s so foreign to us. We lack context. Most of us will live our entire lives and it will be a complete shock to us if more than one person close to us dies on a single day.
For tragedies like the earthquake, we lack context. Try as we might, all we can really understand is that a lot of people died.
Maybe then, instead of trying to understand the whole, we try to understand what we can. The stories of individuals.
Without gore, and in bitter-sweet fashion, an Chinese artist named Coco Wang managed to depict just a handful of stories.
I suggest you read them all.
For me, more than the countless news articles, more than the tv coverage, these ten stories brought home the tragedy. That behind each one is a shattered family, irreparably changed. That in the midst of pain were beacons of love, bravery, selflessness, and kindness. Things that give us that rare opportunity to take pride in calling ourselves “human.”
Kenndy said “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s futures, and we are all mortal.”
Take a moment to reflect on the individual stories, to send them your thoughts, your help, and most importantly your prayers.
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:00 am
I believe that folks have concluded that Reagan’s observation was tied to speeches, where the number of syllables matters most. So “eight million” sounds like less than “seven point four million” which sounds less than “seven million, four hundred thousand”, which sounds less than “seven million, one hundred twenty one thousand, eight hundred forty two and eighty-eight cents”. There is an equivalent phenomenon where numbers that take up more space on the printed page look larger. So, to a certain extent at least, this isn’t that people can appreciate small numbers better.
All that aside, those stories are compelling.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Amazing drawings…