Why do we miss the proper perspective of numbers?
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
06 October 2013
Two weeks ago, terrorists attacked the Westgate Shopping Mall in
However, government operatives, rescue workers and the media only concentrated on the 67 and almost completely ignored the more than 1,000 who walked out alive. Is it that death is more important than life?
What is likely to be more beneficial: figuring out how the 67 died or how the 1,000-plus survived?
On of my friends summarised it this way: God allowed the terrorists to get into the mall so that He may demonstrate His power by saving more than 1,000 people in a crowded building that was being sprayed with bullets.
Imagine this. No one has ever scored 100% in all the papers of any examination. Indeed even the so-called first class candidates score just 70%. Now how would it feel if every day you were reminded that they were failures because they missed 30% of the marks?
Now think about the guy who just passed by scoring 40% - he failed more than half of the questions (60%) but we still celebrate his success!
This preoccupation with the negative can easily derail us from the important things in our lives. A few years ago, the Minister for Public Health, Beth Mugo, was woken up one early Sunday morning to briefed about a serious health threat that had been detected in the country.
She skipped church, rushed to the office and after the briefing from the
Director of Medical Services, she addressed a press conference in which
she informed the nation that a tourist had arrived in
The minister explained that, despite the complex name (H5N1), this was a disease that could be treated with ordinary flu medication and that it was not contagious! The whole affair made me wonder why then she found it necessary to address the nation in an urgently convened press conference.
I estimated that in the time she spent dealing with this harmless disease, over 50 children aged below 5 years died of malaria – a disease that, according to Dr. Davy Koech, the former Director of the Kenya Medical Research Institute, is predictable, preventable and treatable. In short, it shouldn’t be killing anyone!
To answer the original question why we always miss the proper perspective of numbers, I think it is because we never totally grow up. If you give a child a slice of bread, he will ask you why you didn’t apply butter; If you give him a buttered slice, he’ll why you did add jam; and if you give him a buttered, jammed slice, he’ll ask you why you didn’t toast it!
We always notice what we don’t have, instead of being grateful of what we do have. Perhaps if we put the right perspective, we can have the chance to concentrate on the important things, like going to church or figuring out how to stop malaria from killing people instead of chasing a single tourist who’s infect with a harmless, treatable disease!
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