If I’m watching the news and I see a report where a ferry sunk somewhere on the other side of the world, do you know what I feel? Nothing. That’s right. Hundreds of people may have died, and I wouldn’t even care.
In fact, unless they died of some reason other than drowning, say perhaps being eaten by a shiver of sharks, I wouldn’t even be interested in the story. The talking head would tell the story, I’d go “hmm”, and get on with my life without every giving another thought to the people on the ferry.
Does that make me a bad person? No. I think that makes me pretty much normal.
The further one is removed from someone (think of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon) the less one actually cares about that person’s wellbeing. So, you’d likely be really sad if someone in your immediate family were to die.
But by the time you got to grieving for Kobe, Paul Walker or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, your actual level of sadness is (or should be) close to zero. If you find yourself “devastated” by the death of someone you’ve never met, then you’ve got some serious mental health issues.
Well, that’s my opinion anyway.
Last week, an SUV packed with people crashed near the Mexican border. That SUV was carrying 25 people, all illegal immigrants, when it pulled out in front of a very large truck and was t-boned. 13 people died at the scene and nine more are in the hospital in very serious condition.
Ask me how much sadness I felt for the people who died. None. I wasn’t sad, devastated nor even mildly concerned. I didn’t know them and had no emotional attachment to them. I’m not impacted by their deaths in any way.
It might be unfortunate that they died. But not for me. It’s really only unfortunate for the 13 people who died and their close relatives and friends. Their deaths are of no consequence to any of the other 7.6 billion people on this planet.
People die in car crashes every day. The only thing that even made this story interesting is that 25 people were packed like clowns into a single vehicle not intended for that purpose.
So, you see, I don’t care about the 13 people who died. Not even a little bit. But the nine people still in the hospital with life-threatening injuries? Now, that’s a different story.
I do feel something about the injured survivors. They make me angry.
Because it’s almost guaranteed that those nine people have no health insurance. And that means there are nine people who shouldn’t even be in this country, laying in ICU beds recovering from very expensive injuries. Who do you think is paying for their care? If you guessed “taxpayers” then you get a gold star.
These people should have never made it across the border. But they did. And now we’re spending money to keep them alive. Money that we could be using for the benefit of legal citizens of this country instead of people who aren’t supposed to be here.
I’m going to take a wild-ass guess here and say that the cost of health care for those nine people is going to cost a million dollars. That comes to only about $110K per person so it’s probably a really low guestimate. But let’s go with that number anyway.
If you could spend a million taxpayer dollars in a way that would benefit more than a few citizens of this country, how would you spend it? Would you spend it on feeding the homeless? How about some new computers for your local library? Maybe a program that delivers meals to the needy? Perhaps neonatal care for some poor mothers-to-be?
How would you rather spend the money? That’s a trick question. It doesn’t matter how you think the money should be spent, because that ship has already sailed. Or, perhaps I should have said, “that SUV has already crossed the border”.
