We Don't Care
Siddharth Kolichala, Staff Writer
Graphic by Melissa Liu, Copy Editor
Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve heard a lot of people express their sympathies for those who have been affected by the disease. The truth is, we only feel this sympathy because we can see ourselves being potentially impacted in a similar way. And since we care about ourselves a lot, and we can see ourselves in a similar situation in the future, we express sympathy as a way to get out our more visceral, fundamental selfishness.
I’ll give you an example. Thousands of children die each day from poverty-related causes. But nobody cares. At least I don’t. If anybody did care, they would direct their money towards buying a dying child’s life-saving medicine instead of spending it on an extra pair of shoes (which they can easily do, a quick Google search will turn up charities that are good for this). Where did all the coronavirus-related sympathy for dying strangers go? Such a donation would come at little cost to them, but at a tremendous benefit to a stranger. Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work. The ratio at which we care about our own comfort to other peoples’ lives is really almost infinite because the denominator of such is close to 0. And just because our lifestyles are not identical to the more overtly unethical ones of gluttonous celebrities doesn’t mean that ours are at all moral. So if not change your lifestyle, I at least ask you to acknowledge that you don’t care about strangers. People generally refuse to do this, because it makes them feel evil, which should say a lot about the morality of first-world abundance when abject poverty is ending lives across the world. Acknowledge that, if a mother was kneeling in front of you, begging you for money to save her child, you would turn the other way, and reserve your savings for a commodity that more directly benefits you (like a new pair of clothes to add to the many that you already have!) Maybe acknowledging that you don’t care about strangers feels evil because your current behavior is evil.
But nevermind that, I’m just a stupid kid telling you how to spend your money because I don’t know what it’s like to work hard for it (the response I assume). In any case, money is a quantification of value, so the way people choose to spend it is then a listing of priorities, from most important to least. So when rich Northview high schoolers choose to buy an additional pair of brand-name shoes, there is an implicit decision made. For hypothetical purposes, let’s say the shoes cost $100. Then, the benefit that those shoes return to the student must be greater than any other result that $100 could have brought about (this is just a more explicit way of saying what we already know about decision-making). So the student cares more about those shoes than $100 worth of fish tanks or curtains, for instance. This comes as fairly obvious to us. The more interesting result is that the student cares more about those shoes than $100 worth of mosquito nets for children vulnerable to malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since each malaria net averages to about $3 each, the student has effectively turned away 33 children prone to malaria so that he can instead buy the extra pair of shoes he so desperately needs. Some of these 33 children will die of course, and each death could have been easily prevented had the rich Northview student chosen to use his money better. None of this enters his thought process, however, because he doesn’t care. Just like the rest of us, he doesn’t care about strangers he can’t relate to. Not only are the African children of different ethnicity and cultural background, but malaria in America has been eradicated for 70 years. The warm, comfortable shelter built by us benevolent Americans ensures that such diseases never enter the realm of the first-world. The hardship and poverty suffered by so many around the world leave us unbothered because the situation is entirely unrelatable. We can’t, with all our wealth and comfort, ever see ourselves in a similar situation in the future, so, in summary, we don’t care.
For those of you who would still like to help out though, here are a few links to donate to:
City Hope Community GoFundMe created by Northview junior Janice Nam.
Sew to Save GoFundMe by Northview student Pamela Esquivel.
