The Terror of Immediacy

I was doing some thinking the other day. Somehow death, war, poverty, hunger, all of those things don't mean a whole lot to me right now. They exist as concepts, but I've rarely had the chance to understand any of them. Then I thought about constructing one of those really clever scenarios to understand the magnitude of unfathomable numbers.

Statistics warning: I'm playing fast and loose with the numbers here, and they come from unverified sources, but for the sake of argument, I'm going to assume they're in the ballpark.

Deaths per minute:
28.5 - Starvation (for 2007)
1.5 - Iraq War (civilians since 2002)

Those are the only 2 factors I'm going to consider for this exercise.

# of Facebook friends I currently have:
~140

So, if only these two problems in the world affected me immediately and directly, every 4.5 hours, all of my facebook friends would die. After about a day and a half, everyone I know would be gone.

Now, that's not to say most of those who died wouldn't have died anyway, or won't eventually, or that the situations surrounding their deaths aren't, in fact, preventing more deaths. It's just a picture of how things change, I guess.

To round this post out on April 15, I suppose I should mention taxes, so we have death and taxes.

An acquaintance of mine who did some accounting died over the weekend. I think that's what got the ball rolling on this post, and there you have it. Death and taxes and a blog post.