Banality Kills

A shark attack is extraordinary, as is being stuck by lightning, contracting Ebola, and even being killed in a mass shooting. Extraordinary cases draw mass attention like fresh blood draws flies. The main difference is the attention is not nearly as nourishing for the masses as the blood is for the flies. 

Meanwhile, some drunk driver just ran into a family on the sidewalk. It only makes the local news. A cancer patient lit up his last smoke on his death bed. No one noticed. A homeless person passed away from alcohol poisoning over night. The EMTs picking him up were the only ones to marginally care. Life expectancy is longer than it has ever been and still over half the national population is too fat to enjoy it, and they are dying. We are all dying. Many in extremely preventable ways. Many, many more in the ordinary ways than the extraordinary that captures mass attention and focuses national "dialogue".

It is the equivalent of straining out gnats and swallowing camels. We die in mass numbers from heart failure, but panic at the thought of an unloaded assault rifle. We continue to go to fast food chains as if it were no issue, and at the same time express concern over the need for "common sense" gun laws. We don't get vaccinated for the flue, which kills far more people than the public pays attention to, and demand the borders be shut down at the thought of Ebola slithering across public streets. 

We even say things to the effect of gay marriage will destroy the foundation of modern society, while not considering the absurdly high and climbing heterosexual divorce rate not at all correlated to equality laws. 

We critique the speck in our neighbor's eye, and forget the plank in our own. We consider the small, while the banal kills us.