Well, after deciding no one I actually know would care about the tangent I'm on today, I decided to read some of my favorite blogs, and loe & behold, this crazy cool deviantKevin once upon a time said the same thing I wanted to say today. Rather crazy, really.

"After those 2 planes crashed into the Word Trade Center, we were all blissfully ignorant to what was happening around us. Even now, many Americans are STILL blissfully ignorant. The more I read about what the U.S. has done and what the terrorists have done, the more I anger I feel. Even further, the more I read about humanity's history of war, I feel even deeper anger. This sort of shit has been occurring since the beginning of time with no purpose other than to benefit a few people. Yet I look around me, no one seems to notice. I don't think anything will be done. Everyone is waiting for somebody else to answer the question. This is our problem.

Our world has become so big that we feel a widespread "bystander effect". The Bystander Effect is what happens in large crowds. If one person in a large crowd needs help, the more people there are in that crowd, the less likely that person will receive any help. The theory hold that the more people there are in a crowd, the more apt everyone is to think that "someone else" will help that person. So instead of feeling angry or wanting to change anything, humanity just wants to go on pointlessly. Living in blissful ignorance. [...]

But no one cares. Where is the anger?"

I will have to disagree, though, that this "kind of shit has been going on since the beginning of time". It's only been going on since the beginning of humanity, or much more specifically, the beginning of human civilization.

And really, death on a large scale has only been possible since there has been human life on such a high, concentrated scale. In what other civilization have so many people lived so closely together, so much in defiance of the earth? When you think about it, there's a certain irony, yet certain inevitabilty about the Sept. 11 attacks. I don't just mean that the US has been mucking around in other's bussiness for way too long; but the fact that both skyscrapers and airplanes completely seperate from anything naturally occuring; they are both stupendous efforts of humans to overcome nature; or maybe just the ground.

And I'm really glad Kevin pointed out the Bystander Effect. I totally agree, and I've seen it, though have never heard that name for it before.

The thing is, to understand anything in the world today, you have to first think about population. There are 7 billion persons alive today.

I have a mathematical mynd, but I literally cannot comprehend numbers bigger than 500. They lose meaning; I just can't picture them. Talk about money? A thousand is beyond grasp equally as 30 thousand as equally as a duo dicillion. I'll simply never have such a surplus of money; or until I do I cannot understand big numbers.

Same goes for people. If you really think about it, how many people do you know? A hundred well, maybe; a thousand acquantanices. More than that? You'd forget them, and they'd forget you. So how can we really understand the true number of people who died in the attacks, much less the sheer number of people in the world?

The one thing I learned in Calculus was as X approaches infinity, H goes toward zero, and though H never reaches zero (because X itself never really reaches infinity) , we can assume at some point that these infintesimals are, in fact, zero. That is literally all you need to accept to understand Calculus.

So apply this mathematical theory to modern life. As the population, for some practical purposes, approaches infinity, you, H, one division of the overall population, approach zero. So you are literally nothing in the world as a whole. It's like in Econ where they say a single buyer can't alter the market. Way for education to make a person feel impotent!

Collaging once, I found one of my favorite clippings, "The Infintesimal Gets Smaller" I laughed out loud, and Rachel R. was over, so I explained the whole Calc "an infintesimal is zero, really because otherwise the world don't make sense" thing to her, but I don't think she got the irony.

But it's total crap. I suppose I will be lame & say I can't believe this because to my cat, my sister, a few of my friends (not to mention me mumsie) I am the world, blah bla bla. I don't have a good reason today. But just like saying "it's just human nature- people are bad" I simply can't accept it.   ¶ 22:27