By Selwyn Duke

If there is one overlooked aspect of the current
federal-government surveillance scandal, it’s modernist America’s
attitude toward death. What do I mean? Well, if I said that the number
of children who die in school shootings every year was statistically
insignificant in a nation of 311 million people or that there is an
acceptable level of death through terrorism, many would accuse me of
being a cold, soulless bean counter. But don’t we in essence live this
attitude all the time? Every year approximately 175,000 children die
through drowning, but we haven’t yet outlawed swimming pools or called
for exhaustive government surveillance of them; and about 42,000 people
die yearly in traffic accidents — 115 a day and 1 person every 13
minutes— but we haven’t yet mandated a five-mile-per-hour speed limit.
Death is often accepted as the cost of doing business, and in this case
the business is living.

That is, we accept death within certain contexts. But the context
here isn’t “avoidable” deaths — it’s deaths that manage to avoid the
news.

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