American math

America's math skills are suffering pretty badly these days. Apparently some believe that 300=300,000.

The Mayor of Biloxi, A. J. Holloway, said: “This is our tsunami.”

I know the man is going through a tough time - his town was devastated by hurricane Katrina.

However, what he said is completely asinine. How you can you say that "this is our tsunami"? Katrina is a tragedy, but tragedies occur on all scales, ranging from broken fingernail to genocide. In terms of human lives, the following are roughly comparable:

1 tsunami
10 Union Carbide Bhopals
100 September 11th' s
1000 Katrinas
10000 Ted Bundy's

I can say without hyperbole that the tsunami last December was a thousand times worse than Katrina. Virtually all New Orleans residents escaped with their lives - the same cannot be said for a number of towns in Indonesia. What's being implied when an American equates his local tragedy, with 300 lives lost, to a tragedy that happened to a different culture, where 300,000 lives were lost?

I just want the rest of the world to know that I am one American who doesn't believe that a random American's life is equal to 1000 Indonesian lives. Or even two Indonesian lives for that matter. To me there's little difference between some American schmoe I never met, and some Indonesian schmoe I never met. I don't believe a man's nationality affects the value of this life that much.

Why don't you just go ahead and call Katrina "our Holocaust"?