Stalin was right.
I’m sure by now you’ve hear that Heath Ledger is dead, though they’re still trying to confirm the cause (it looks like drugs). Death is a tragedy for any family. Yes, Ledger was someone’s son, someone’s friend, someone’s boyfriend/lover/husband, and someone’s father, and his death I’m sure will be felt in the entertainment world. It may drive even more folks out to the movie theaters to watch him play The Joker in “The Dark Knight,” his last great hurrah, to see the last great work of yet another celebrity who went before his time.
However, if you’ve been to MSNBC.com since word first broke about Ledger’s death, you may have seen another story, tucked into the right side of the website with a small black-and-white image, with the headline and subheader, “Congo conflict kills more than 5 million: Report cites, war, disease and malnutrition; the most conflict deaths since WW2.”
So what is the real tragedy here? Undoubtedly, many people who did not know Ledger will feel shock and sadness, and may even cry, about the news of his death, but how many of those will cry about the 5.4 million dead–45,000 a month–in Congo, or the countless millions that are still suffering all over Africa, going before their time? You won’t find this story on CNN’s site, and you’ll only find a few stories about minor disease oubreaks in Congo on Fox News’ site. BBC News has a story about how Congo the peace talks stalled again, but you have to go into that story to find out the number dead, and generally few Americans care about peace talks in Africa. I don’t want to sound like a typically self-righteous young liberal, but this is, in many ways, the reality of it.
In a world that appears to be so closely connected through technology, we remain strikingly disconnected, emotionally, from the rest of the world. We’ve even become disconnected with the events in Iraq and Afghanistan, where our troops are still dying almost daily. The stories that matter are instead replaced by links to forums where people can “share photos, memories” about celebrity deaths. Only when something sudden happens, like a terrorist attack or a tsunami, do we wake up for a short while, give some money to a relief agency, and then go back to our lives as our awareness of world wanes. We all do it…even I do. It’s difficult not to. Still, in anticipation over the media circus that will likely surround this latest occurrence, though I imagine to something of a lesser degree than everything that happened surrounding Anna Nicole Smith’s death (lest we remember that joke), I guess I felt the need to vent, even if I’m not saying anything new.
The death of a million truly is a statistic…no matter the multiples.