Death Toll

«Faire semblant d’etre heureux, pour aller gentiment se coucher mais demain rien n’ira mieux » Damien Saez, Jeune et Con.

“Death toll”, is amongst the most used expressions today. What does it mean? It comes usually in sentence like that: “working to assess the death tolls” or “Death Toll Tops 11,000”. But what does “death toll” mean. Death has an obvious meaning about dying or ceases to live, and toll weirdly enough in a dictionary means fee or tax (toll free number for example). “Death toll” is basically the tax of dead people! And we count that toll and observe it as if it's the stock market: “Other death tolls from ***** are unchanged”. This makes me go back to the ramifications of the word death.

Do I really understand it when I read death toll tops 11,000? If every one of these dead people knew 10 persons, with each one of those 11,000, 10 other persons are “dying” too. So for 11,000 people, there is 110,000 “dying”!

And when I think about that happening to me or someone I know, I feel like I’m the one dying. I hope I keep on remembering that and understanding the true meaning of death toll: A euphemism that numbs our brain so that we “analyze” the news, and predict tomorrow’s stock of death taxes. Because I know that I tend to forget it sometimes when I read about Chechnya or Somalia because it’s far from home or where I am, but I’m wrong and I should fix that. But that doesn’t mean that I have to understand that and then get blocked there by the overwhelming feelings, or at least anger, that storm inside in front of this horror. Instead I should think about what can be done, what can be changed, and if it is only 0.000001% of a help, I’ll go for it, whether it’s a flower next to a nickname or a heck of a shake up.

There’s much, too much, war in the name of peace.