Body Count

I knew what a body count was when I was twelve. I grew up with the Vietnam war in my living room. Not actually in my living room, but rather the reportage of that conflict. Keeping track of the dead and wounded was an everyday chore. The tally was kept, and whether points were being shaved in our favor was ultimately the question: Did we get more of theirs than they got of ours? Were the good guys winning? More importantly, were the bad guys losing? As it turns out, this is more like golf, where the lower score wins.
Final score: Us 282,000, Them 440,000. This is not including the 1,313,000 people in the stands, the civilians who made the mistake of getting in the way of all that periodically misdirected aggression and napalm. In other words, if you added together the body counts of both combatants, they would add up to about half as many civilian deaths. It may not be clear from those numbers exactly who won the war in Vietnam, but it's pretty obvious who lost.
Which brings me back to the future, where most of us will live the rest of our lives. Reading the news today? Oh boy. Seventy-seven dead in Yemen, the victims of a triple suicide bombing. It makes me hearken back to a time when suicide was a singular sport, and using plastic explosive would have seemed like, pardon the pun, overkill. Here in the United States, where the right to bear plastic explosive shall not be infringed, a crazed gunman went on a shooting rampage in Mesa, Arizona killing four. It should be noted that the phrases "crazed gunman" and "shooting rampage" can be found most any day on your U.S. News. I'm pretty sure that's in the Constitution too. Back across the pond, we've got that up and coming crazed militants who went on their own rampage, the Islamic State who shot twenty foreign tourists who made the mistake of going to a museum. The difference I have noted between crazed gunmen here in the United States and crazed militants in other parts of the world is that foreign crazies are generally pretty good about claiming responsibility for their heinous acts. Here in America? Not so much.
The trouble with trying to keep track of the body count presently is the lack of defined conflicts. Sure, it would be easy enough to make an accounting of the victims of the war on terror, or the war on drugs, or the war on Christmas. If there were more organized accounting, or if we could ask our crazed gunmen to announce their victims with more precision and wear color-coded uniforms, then it might start to make some sense.
Yeah. Right.