Modalities of Mortalities

 We are not concerned with the very poor.
They are unthinkable, and only to be approached
by the statistician or the poet
-- E. M. Forster 

Out of a hundred people:
Righteous- 35, which is a lot
Righteous and understanding- 3
Worthy of compassion- 99
Mortal- 100 out of 100
(Thus far this figure still remains unchanged.)
― Wisława Szymborska 

Outside of the killings,
DC has one of the lowest crime rates
in the country
―Mayor Marion Barry 

Candy is dandy,
but liquor is quicker
--Hard Lines, 
Ogden Nash
____________________

The online news source Slate bemoans the fact in their lede today that five children were killed by gun violence over the Labor Day holiday  ("11-Year-Old, 7-Year-Old, Two 5-Year-Olds, and 3-Year-Old Killed by Guns Over Labor Day Weekend"). No doubt bad news, but let's go for some fair-and-balanced, an approach woefully unpopular among the agenda crowd. 

Using Paul Simon's "50 Ways" method, let's scatter-gun the topic of death: 

• Four to five children die per day in the United States as a result of child abuse. This is via the brutal beatings that we all picture when the dire topic is discussed. However, far more die via a protracted mental and physical dissipation due to long-term neglect, but these tragic cases are under the wire, and go unnoticed by most people. 

• Three woman are killed daily in the U.S. as a result of intimate partner (IP) violence. Of course, many others are consigned to lives of brutality at the hands of their partners, coming near death many times before actually dying. We do not like to hear it, and sweep it away with a "She should have seen it coming," or, "Why did she stay?" conveniently dismissing the actual problems on both sides which facilitate such "hidden" brutality in our midst.

• Nine die daily from the results of "distracted driving," defined as texting, viewing media, etc. Some people do not realize that watching the road is not compatible with reading a Facebook feed. We can dismiss this one as "Darwin at work," save the behavior kills so many people who are faultless, save for being an innocent victim of the others' carelessness and narcissism.

• 3,287 people die daily on the road in the U.S. from all causes of traffic fatalities. Just the cost of driving in a highly-distracted society, among drivers with varying levels of skills, sobriety and consciousness and vehicles in various states of repair. We have all seen the grotesque videos in driver's ed showing the hideous outcomes of poor driving, yet the statistics remain horrendous. But it is not sexy to suggest that we might do otherwise. The cost of living in a free society, don't you know?  

• Now that we are tethered to our electronic devices 24/7 like a new umbilicus, the cost of that inactivity is beginning to show.The daily numbers may become staggering. Perhaps 1 in 10 deaths worldwide is attributable to inactivity, similar to the number of deaths caused by smoking.  Inactivity may cause more deaths than obesity. But you won't wrest that smart phone addict's fix away unless it is from their cold, dead hands. 

• 112 die by suicide in the U.S. daily. We will stop here.  

We have not even begun to look at the toll of our two discretionary wars in the Middle East -- the gift that keeps on giving. We are not looking at reasons, but simply modalities of mortalities and morbidities.

Addiction and a sense of entitlement feed many of these destructive behaviors, poverty and despair, others, so you will not see voluntary changes in these self-neglectful behaviors. But they will kill you quicker than beans, all the same. 

But the damn fool gun-toters, "those Americans" neatly and disdainfully lumped by people like once-progressive candidate Obama as the God-and-Guns group ... they are an easy target for our floating unease that things are not right. If we could just do something about guns, well, we'd have a much better society.

Right?