General

The Price of Life

By Dweep Chanana ⋅ March 24, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅ Post a comment

I used to hold a grudge against the western world. Why was it that life in poor countries was so cheap, while the life of even one American or British caused such outrage?

After 9/11 the American public went berserk, equating the tragedy with Pearl Harbor. It was indeed a tragedy, but in the grand scheme of things only a few thousand people died. More die everyday in Africa. And in so many parts of the world terrorist attacks hardly raise an eyebrow. Are the Americans, or the British, so special that they should expect to remain untouched?

More proof of the dispensibility of our lives in the third world came when the liberating Defense Department simply refused to account for the deaths of those it liberated. Not only were Iraqi lives cheap, they were completely dispensable, not even worthy of being a statistic. Compare that with the exhaustive DNA identification done in Thailand after the tsunami on the bodies of western tourists.

Now, we can finally put a price to those lives. Grant Montgmery’s blog on International Aid has some numbers for how much the Americans donated, per victim of the 9/11 and tsunami disasters.

9/11 —————-$736,771
Tsunami ————— $1,173

The Right-to-life Republicans may not like it, but there is a price to the life they protect. I just wonder how much lower the Tsunami victim’s life would have been valued, if a few hundred western tourists had not died there.