The Disaster Grief Index

I don’t think that I am giving out any new information when I say that we live in a world rife with terror, disease, famine, war, and crime, as well as a host of natural disasters that can strike without warning. In fact, I found examples of each of those calamities in today’s newspaper—and all I read is the sports section and the comics. Tragedy seems to be a by-product of civilization. Some catastrophes are as naturally-occurring as the air we breathe, but most are man-made. Although I pride myself on being almost completely desensitized to the pain and suffering of others, there are occasions when I come across a news report of some horrific event about which I think I should probably feel bad. That’s almost like caring, isn’t it?

Over the years I have developed something I call the Disaster Grief Index to help me gauge the degree to which I should feign anguish when I read about the misery of others. The model for my index was taken from how television news covers these events. I figure if CNN deems something to be important, then I should, too. Let me walk you through this.

First of all, you should primarily only care about bad things happening to Americans. The way that television news explains it, if tragedy strikes non-Americans then they probably have it coming. Maybe they should try being more careful. If TV is somehow coerced into covering a disaster in some far-off land it is only because the event is of biblical proportions. CNN uses a sliding scale formula in order to calculate when deaths are reported. They have made a computation as to how viewers should regard the deaths of total strangers.

1 American life =
10 English-speaking non-Americans
50 Europeans who speak a language other than English
1,000 Latin Americans
10,000 Asians
1,000,000 Africans (except white, English-speaking Africans)

The way this works is if one American dies then that is news, but it takes ten British people to die to warrant the same coverage as the lone American death. Let’s be honest with ourselves, do any of us have time to hear a story about 5,000 Chinese people whose bus went off a cliff? Anything less than one million Africans perishing will be relegated to a small segment that airs somewhere between celebrity news and a funny security video of someone accidentally being sprayed by a shaken-up can of soda. It is called proportionality and it is how we make it through the day without being crippled by anxiety.

Before you accuse television reporters of being heartless pricks, let me remind you that people die every day, or almost every day (I have a birthday coming up so I would appreciate it if everyone whose time is almost out to die either the day before or the day after). You can’t get worked up every time a tidal wave slams into some country you can’t even pronounce, let alone find on a map. According to CNN, what completely shatters the Disaster Grief Index, what you should really get hysterical about is the disappearance of cute white girls. From CNN’s bloated coverage it is apparent that if one cute white girl goes missing that is worth at least five thousand people dying in a volcano eruption in Bolivia. For the value of a dead, ugly American girl you can revert back to the original index.

Just this morning I read that there was an earthquake in Pakistan a few months ago that killed 73,000 people. I don’t even remember hearing about it when it happened, probably because there weren’t any cute American girls among the victims for CNN to report. Foreign disasters please take note: If you want to capture the attention of the American audience, be sure to include a few American victims—preferably cute white girls.