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Life Is Cheap

Arthur Hoppe

His column appears in the San Francisco Chronicle thrice a week.

On the same day that Egyptian airliner went down off Nantucket a cyclone swept through the east coast of India. The plane crash took 217 lives, the cyclone more than 3,000. It also left more than a million people homeless.

The plane crash was all over the front page and a half dozen pages inside. The cyclone rated a 12-inch story on Page 11. Few would fault the news judgment of the editors. The plane crash was at least 15 times more important to readers than the cyclone.

After all, natural disasters are far more common than crashes of jumbo jets. The airliner's sudden plunge out of the skies was both dramatic and mysterious, a plot for a movie. The cyclone, a force we understand, took hours to wreak its toll.

In a plane crash, we join vicariously with the investigators, searching for the cause so that we can take steps to remedy it. But we know what causes cyclones, and there is nothing we can do to prevent one from striking.

Nevertheless, had a cyclone roared through the Midwest killing more than 3,000 Americans, it would go down in our history books as one of the stories of the century.

One reason for this disparity is, of course, geographical. We are far more concerned with a neighbor breaking his leg than with, say, 3,000 Iraqis being killed in the distant Middle East.

Yet the reason is not solely geographical. Should 3,000 Englishmen die as a hurricane pounded that far-away island, we would be shocked and appalled.

It is also racial and cultural. Most Indians are brown-skinned Hindus. We scarcely blinked at the deaths of 800,000 black Africans in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Had those Indians or Rwandans Caucasian Christians like most Englishmen, we would have read of their deaths with horror.

Moreover, that cyclone swept through one of the poorest regions of India. It is difficult for us to identify with poverty-stricken Indians. We live in solid homes. We have a dozen changes of clothing. We speak the world's most widely accepted language. We have paved streets, skyscrapers and flush toilets. We drive cars, take vacations and fly in planes. How far easier it is to identify with those 217 poor souls aboard Flight 990. They might have been us.

We can envision ourselves lounging in a cushioned seat aboard an airliner, reading or watching a movie, when suddenly there is a an explosion, screams and we are hurtling to our deaths.

Yet how we must strain to see ourselves in rags, huddling in a flimsy hut by a fetid stream as the winds rise to a deafening shriek, carrying away all around us. That couldn't be us.

When I was young, it was perfectly acceptable to say that life is cheap in the Far East. As the years passed, such a phrase became politically incorrect as it carried the stigma of racism and cultural and economic superiority. Those who would say such a thing were shunned by liberal-minded humanists.

But the truth of the matter is that, in our eyes, life is still cheap for those with different colored skins who live far away in poverty. We like to say that we believe all men and women are created equal.

But what we really believe, to paraphrase George Orwell, is that some of us are more equal than others.

Copyright, 1999, Chronicle Publishing Co. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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