So this is what I've been up to

I've just finished my formal writing (rant) for english, and because I have no other ideas for posts I'm going to milk this for all that it's worth. What a wanker.
Bye now.

I hate numbers.

There’s a reason why I dropped Maths after level one, beyond the fact that I could barely figure out how to turn on my own calculator. It’s about something a bit bigger than that. It’s the way that Maths creeps into everything that I don’t appreciate. It creeps through our history books, through our brains, and, here’s the worst part, into our emotions, all the places it doesn’t belong.

It’s not just a strange fact of life that we’re more deeply affected by “The Boy In Striped Pyjamas” than when we read about the holocaust in history class. Mathematics would dictate that because 5,999,998 more people died over the course of the latter, we should therefore care 5,999,998 times more about it. We should cry 5,999,998 times harder about it. We should. But we don’t. We care so deeply for the plight of Bruno and Shmuel, that to the mathematical mind, it doesn’t make sense.

However, if you look past the mathematics, the equations, you come to realize this is because of one very important thing: we know these people, we know their backgrounds, as we know our families and our friends.

Bruno and Shmuel are no longer nameless, they’re faces plucked from the crowd, instead of being part of a big, blurry picture, where nobody’s sure who is who. Essentially, they are our eight-year-old cousin, or brother, or son.

Although I am an atheist, I understand, and, to an extent, accept the idea that God made us all equal. And maybe He did. And maybe we are, at least to Him. Whether it was God’s doing or not, there are close to seven billion people on this earth. But, at least emotionally, we are not by any stretch equal to each other.

It’s just not realistic or a wise way to expend energy to care for absolutely everyone the way that we care about those in close proximity to us.

The mathematically minded have a tendency to say, “Who cares about X, because more people are dying from Y”. “Y” usually equates to something along the lines of “children dying in the third world”, and X to something local, such as the Christchurch Earthquake, or Pike River. You see, mathematicians, I don’t deny that the deaths of innocent children are a tragedy. I’m not that awful. What I DO deny, is the reasoning that numbers are the only factor we should consider when a tragedy occurs.

We all knew someone who was directly affected by the Christchurch earthquake. For me, it was a family friend who was thrown down her office stairs by the force of the tremors. For you, maybe a friend or acquaintance’s house was destroyed, maybe they were injured, maybe they were even killed. And you cared.

I’m honest enough to say that if a person I didn’t know, that I didn’t have any connection to, was injured falling down their office stairs, I probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

Recently, in the news, Amanda Todd, a teenager, committed suicide. Numbers again came into play, along with their good friend, comparisons of situations. On the girl’s memorial page, I came across a comment from another teen. When it was stated that Amanda Todd was bullied every day at school, he said “I was bullied every day at school, and my father beat me every day for six years”. Amanda Todd had depression? That’s nothing, because this boy has not only depression, but also an anxiety disorder, OCD, ADD, PTSD, and insomnia. Amanda Todd cut herself? “I’ve had scraped knees that bled more than those little scratches”. Unfortunately for this boy’s argument, mental illness is not all black and white. The pain brought to Amanda’s family is not alleviated because you have more mental illnesses, or because your scraped knees bled more than her slit wrists.

Psychologists do not base their treatment plan based on the mathematical volume of blood that comes out of an individual, nor the amount of minutes that they have felt victimised or bullied. Believe it or not, it’s about what the person is feeling, which no one can know, except the person himself or herself.

The numbers game doesn’t just stop at mental illness; it creeps also into physical illness. Three months ago, my father was diagnosed with cancer in two parts of his body. Many cancer patients have the disease in more than two parts of their body. Many cancer patients have worse odds of surviving. Many don’t survive at all. Many cancer patients’ tumours are bigger, their range of motion is more limited, they have to get chemo more often. They lose their hair faster. On paper, statistically, we’re the lucky ones. But emotionally? I’m not so sure. Some cancer patients were diagnosed two months ago, instead of three, giving them more right to be upset, so they say.

Cancer is cancer. Suicide is suicide. Tragedy is tragedy. None of the above instances should ever have any kind of number put on it, any kind of label. Grief is absolute. We don’t play the numbers game with positive emotions in our life, so why should we with the negative? Mathematics, the root of all sense in the world, is starting to look less and less sensible.

There are a lot of factors that contribute into a person’s mental well-being, but it’s not a mathematical equation, waiting to be solved. You cannot rate instances of grief and tragedy on a scale from one to ten. Mathematics is meant to be the ultimate problem solver, but, to me, it’s the problem that needs to be solved. And the first step to solving this problem?

Put down the calculator.