I just glanced at a program I have running in the system tray to keep me abreast of system resources, and noticed that I only had 625 MB of RAM available. I was rebooting Firefox to free up some more when I realized that (a.) there was still six-tenths of a gigabyte unused, and (b.) that unused RAM was precisely 1,250 times as much as I had in my first computer.

How quickly we get used to big numbers. First kilobytes, then megabytes, gigabytes and now we’re thinking in terms of terabytes (1,099,511,627,776 bytes). They become meaningless, just like other big numbers.  A billion dollars here, a billion there. A trillion for this war, two trillion for that one. A $650 billion annual defense budget that even the Pentagon admits is 25% bigger than it needs to be, due to the support of programs that are already obsolete or unusable in the conditions of modern warfare — or simply unnecessary — but that are putting money in someone’s pocket or district.

Numbers are relatively meaningless, unless they’re our numbers. A couple of over-privileged kids from our town getting wiped out in daddy’s Beemer is terrible. One loved one, sick or dying, is a tragedy. Thirty thousand children worldwide dying of starvation every day is just a number.

Clearly this is a form of denial; an unwillingness to accept things that we believe we cannot change — that are too awful to even try to comprehend and address.

And so, we don’t.

And nothing changes.