In her breathtaking book "For the Time Being" Annie Dillard wonders at numbers. How can a human fathom the vast numbers of things that surround us: the number of stars, the number of grains of sand, the number of people killed by other people and by nature? The train bombings in Mumbai yesterday make my eyes gloss over and my brain switch to another topic. Western news media create their own world. It seems to have little relation to ours. In their world only about 100 people die a month. And those one hundred deaths produce bold headlines and we are all supposed to wake up from our number-induced trance and take notice and get angry or sentimental or something.
One soldier in the Canadian military dies in combat. It's what he could have expected (and I say that with no disrespect to him or his grieving family) and there is a hue and cry: "It was a waste!", "Bring home the troops!".
1426 people are trampled to death in Mecca during the Haj in 1990 and it's a one word statistic on some link buried under 1000 pages on BBC's website (it happens every year).
And 160 (and counting) die in "co-ordinated attacks" in Mumbai. It's those terrorists. And since terrorists first appeared on earth in 2001 we must all sit up and start to analyze and run back to our podiums to root for our side in the conflict of ideas and ideologies where hundreds of people (188 in Washington D.C. this year already) are murdered in cold blood, unnoticed.
What Dillard points out is this: our experience now, in the 21st century is nothing new-humans have been killing each other in vast numbers ever since we've been around. Live in the present, go where you must. Exercise common sense. And live free of fear.