Guilt for being human

I was reminded yesterday of the quote, usually attributed to Stalin, that a single death is a tragedy but a million deaths are a statistic. What brought it to mind was a post on a friend's blog about Martin Luther King day. She wrote, quite rightly, about the great courage and the great legacy of Dr King and then went on to talk about the embarrassment she feels that her blogging is about such trivial matters as the weather in Chicago. She shouldn't feel that way though, not really, should she?

In the great scheme of things the vast majority of us lead trivial lives. Most of us do nothing that significantly affects the world. Most of us will die unremarked by all but a handful who will mourn us and most of us will be unremembered fifty years hence.

Only a very few will touch, or be touched by, greatness. Martin Luther King was one such, with good luck and a trailing wind Barack Obama may yet turn out to be another, but for most of us we are dust in the wind. Or to put it in a different and more extended metaphor, we are small pebbles in a fast flowing river with just a few who are boulders and the very occasional dam.

Because of this, because our lives are so utterly mundane, it's the mundane stuff that affects us; that becomes the focus of our concern; that we worry about. Of course the world is filled with big problems: disease and genocide in Africa; war in Iraq or Afghanistan or Gaza; financial collapse and ruin everywhere; poverty in Asia; starvation; child slavery. These are all monstrous injustices . The filled is filled with misery and suffering.

The trouble is, and there is a real danger that this will sound callous and uncaring, that for most of us we can't spend our time worrying about those things; and we shouldn't. For me it isn't that I don't care but that these are things that I can do nothing about and that, if truth be told, have little or no impact on my day to day life.

A missed tram that will make me late and cause the eighteen people in my class to miss a single English lesson is, to me, of more urgency, more significance and yes, more importance, than genocide in Darfur. And I know just how that sounds and I say it unrepentantly. There is absolutely nothing I can do to stop the genocide but I can make those eighteen people's lives better just by getting up earlier and making sure I don't miss my tram.

So, when blogging, which am I more likely to talk about? Will it be trivial, inconsequential stuff like the weather, the trains or students who don't do their homework; or will it be big matters of great import like war, injustice or global warming? Of course it will be the trivial things. They may not in any worldwide sense matter more but in a very real sense they matter more to me. They matter more to me because they affect my daily life and I can, sometimes, exert a little control over them. For the big stuff, it doesn't affect me immediately; there is nothing I can do about it anyway and there is probably nothing I can say that hasn't been said before by other, more eloquent commentators.

The great trick of the matter is to concentrate on the things that, while unimportant generally, are important to you and to, and this is the thing, not feel guilty about it. It isn't your fault if a snowstorm in your neighbourhood means more to you than a drought in Africa. You shouldn't feel guilty if you rail and rant about increases in your utility bills while you know that many many people have no utilities to be billed for. Guilt, other than personal guilt for your own actions, is probably one of the least productive of all human emotions.

If you don't care more about your own family's relatively minor trials and tribulations than you do about the most hideous things half a world away then you probably aren't human. Of course you should care about all those things. Of course you should do anything that you can to help. But the bottom line is that you can only care about them in an abstract and impersonal way. The death of a million people is a statistic. The death of one, one who is known to you, is a tragedy. Big things far away are bound to mean less to you than small things nearby. There is no point in feeling guilty for being human.