Good Vibrations

A natural disaster. Mass destruction. Countless dead. And that's how we measure the weight of a disaster isn't it? By the number of the dead. Makes me curious. Why the dead? Why is it that the number of lives taken is what makes one disaster worse than another? It's a cheap system constructed by people who have no sense of suffering, of anything they can't simply and coldly quantify.

It's not how many died that tells us how terrible a disaster is. The number of dead is just that. A number. You want to know how really terrible an event is? You don't look at the dead. You look at the survivors. They're the ones who know the disaster better than anybody. The dead are gone. Their suffering is over. The ones who live are the ones who suffer . It's the ones who live who feel the full weight of the disaster.

Tell me how many died, you aren't telling me a thing. I don't deal in quantification. I deal in what's real. What I can feel. Numbers don't mean a thing to me. Suffering, now that's something I can wrap my head around. Tell me how many people it hurt. Tell me how many families it ruined. Lives destroyed, but not taken. That's a disaster. That's tragedy. You can keep the numbers.