Christina Swan

Which life is more worth?

An African mother with many children, whose life has been cut short by Aids? An African child who dies of malaria but never realistically had a chance to live anyway? An Iraqi intellectual killed in a car bomb in the market place? It happens every day, and we see it on the news every day, but our ears eventually grow deaf to hearing about it. 170 Iraqis killed in one day seems to be a much more acceptable occurence than 33 American college students killed with guns that the State allows.

Which life is more worth? A Sri Lankan fisherman dead in a tsunami, leaving a hungry wife and kids behind? A prisoner on death row, forced to die early because of something he's done? An American college student shot and killed in the classroom in front of terrified co-students? Saddam Hussein?

Show me the most honourable way of dying, and I will tell you which person was the most worth...

They say you don't know what you've got until it's gone. Like the value of life itself is never truly appreciated until you die. And your worth is communicated to the outside world according to how you died. What colour your skin is. Where in the world you live. Whether you live in the West or what they call the non-West, or should I say the "axis of evil", mr. Bush?

If your fifteen minutes of fame happen to come after you die, you can be assured that you were most likely a very likeable person indeed. And you were most likely white.

A black man dying of malaria - no one cares. But put the white man into the same situation, and it becomes "unnatural" and outrageous - suddenly the idea of free mosquito nets for all seems a good idea after all... An Iraqi woman killed by a market bomb in the name of peace - no one outside Baghdad notices, and her name never makes the news. If she just happened to be a white woman, however, say for example a white journalist, incidentally at the wrong place at the wrong time, the newspapers wouldn't stop writing about it until they'd exhausted every single angle of the case.

Like Barbara Bush, the mother of the US president, said in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina when visiting the crowded out stadium where refugees from Hurricane Katrine were seeking shelter amid intolerable stench, absolute poverty and mounting anarchic violence: "They were underprivileged before the hurricane came, so it isn't that bad for them".

No, it can't be that bad for them. But it's bad for us - us whities, us richies, us people who own the media and run society in many of the Western countries - the same countries that "matter" to us. Death is a sensational topic, and the number one bestseller in the tabloid newspapers. And when we're not concentrating on death, let us all turn our collective focus back to the time Britney Spears went out without underwear, in the hope that it brings up good memories of the times that have passed. For the times that are coming aren't any better.

Or are they?

Christina