It is curious how coincidences sometimes happen.
On Monday I was speaking to one of my colleagues about the Apple PowerMac G5 and the way that it regulates it’s fan speed. I told him an anecdotal tale of a university in America that were using 1100 of the machines to build a cluster super-computer and that they had to orient the machines in a particular way because when running Linux, they would of created a 60 mph wind in their computer room.
The reason this is a coincidence is that the university in question is Virginia Tech and at the same time I was speaking, people were being shot and killed by a crazed Korean gunman who decided he didn’t like rich kids anymore.
The events in Virgina are of course shocking, for a number of reasons.
I find it shocking that it is ‘that’ easy to purchase a firearm in the US, shocking that the university has no real safeguards to prevent firearms being brought onto the campus and shocking that so many lives with so much promise were extinguished so easily and quickly by one individual.
What I also find shocking is the amount of press coverage the event has garnered. It is a terrible tragedy for the people and families involved of course, but on a global scale it was the merest drop in the ocean of death and destruction that happened that day.
On Monday many thousands of lives also ended in the third world due to disease and malnutrition but little was mentioned on the mainstream media because the amount of death and suffering is relentless, it happens every day. It is a story we have all heard before and so is not sensational enough to make the evening news.
Measles, a disease more of less eradicated (or at least controlled and incidental) in the west, kills about a thousand lives a day in third world countries, where parents can barely feed their children let alone afford simple medicines like penicillin.
HIV is wiping out swathes of the African population and there’s little or no money to provide basic care and health education.
On Monday, in the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, at least as many people as those who died in Virgina, were shot and blown up by the American and coalition troops, and that’s not to mention the self inflicted casualties from sectarian fighting and violence in Iraq.
I think, when morning the unfortunate souls that were killed at VT (and of course we should mourn them as theres was a tragic loss), it is worth having a sense of perspective.
These were middle class, wealthy westerners and the media has reacted because of that, but their deaths were not the only bad thing that happened on that day, there is a bigger picture that we should see.
For a sense of perspective go here: