What constitutes a "tragedy"?

NFL Tragedy By Rob Tornoe | March 24th, 2011
I’m a fan of the NFL, even if my Buffalo Bills haven’t done anything in, say ten years or so (the last time the Bills played in a playoff game was 1999, which they lost due to the Music City Miracle). However, the way I hear people complain and talk incessantly about the NFL season (as if it’s not going to happen) just makes me wonder what we really view as a tragedy, or even news.
More: http://blog.cagle.com/2011/03/nfl-tragedy/

A related question, that I asked in 2007, is"How much is a human life worth?" The extent any death is tragic seems to depend on the answer to this corollary inquiry.

Human Life on the Discount Table
By
James Castagnera
For weeks we’ve been riveted by the unsuccessful search for six coal miners trapped in a Utah mine. Three rescuers died attempting to locate the half dozen men, while the national news media reported every borehole, every sound probe, and every statement by the mine owner and his critics. A nation of more than 300 million shared to some extent the anxiety of the miners’ families and friends.
Meanwhile, a mine disaster in China, which killed 181, received only passing mention in American news media. National Public Radio noted that on average 13 miners die every day in China. That’s more than 4700 miners every year.
Many years ago a New York newspaper editor told a cub reporter, “When a dog bites a man, that’s not news. When a man bites a dog, that’s news.” The commonplace is discounted. Adam Smith’s invisible hand manipulates the marketplace of information as it manipulates the global economy. In other words, when there’s a lot of something, each individual item is worth less than if the item were rare. This goes for news items as well as manufactured goods.
It goes for human lives, as well.
To me this constitutes a cautionary tale. Consider murder. Homicide is a rarity, thank heavens, here in Havertown. When one spouse stabbed the other in a mattress shop on West Chester Pike a few years ago, the killing was headline news. Meanwhile, a mere dozen miles down that same road, in Philadelphia, 400 murders a year is the norm. Philly’s politicians wring their hands in public now and then, but not much of significance is being done about the body count. The poor of Philadelphia are many and they individually are little valued. In our middle class community, every life still seems to matter.
In America mine disasters are rarities. The news media report on them relentlessly when they occur. Murders are commonplace: 579 in the Big Apple by Christmas Eve last year; 464 in LA, as Los Angelinos awaited Santa’s arrival. The killings get noted only in passing on the AM radio news stations. The same, I assume, can be said of the Chinese media’s reporting of industrial deaths.
This brings me to another interesting statistic you may have missed. “While the military ‘quagmire’ in Iraq was said to tip the scales of power in the U.S. midterm elections, most Americans have no idea more of their fellow citizens – men, women and children – were murdered this year (2006) by illegal aliens than the combined death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan since those military campaigns began.” This comes to us compliments of Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa, via a Washington reporter named Joe Farah, who adds, “If those numbers are correct, it translates to 4,380 Americans murdered annually by illegal aliens. That's 21,900 since Sept. 11, 2001.”
[http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53103] I offer this in passing for whatever you think it’s worth.
Last October the official U.S. population reached 300 million. Nobody really knows the number of illegal aliens in the country but 12 million gets bandied about as if we do know. Proponents of a path toward legalization for these folks often argue that, except for Native Americans, we’re all descended from immigrants. Carried to its extreme, that thinking leads to conclusions like: because companies and cities were once free to dump their untreated waste into their rivers, they shouldn’t be subject to clean-water laws now, or that because hunters once drove buffalo and eagles and wolves to near-extinction, it ought to be open season again today. The “we’re all immigrants” argument makes no sense at all.
Times change. Populations grow. Lives become discounted. When uncountable aliens move among us… when the faceless poor are preyed upon by gang members and drug dealers (and, apparently, by some of those faceless illegals) in our cities… when their stories slip silently into the “dog bites man” category… then I think every one of us slips imperceptibly lower in individual value.
You aren’t buying that? Perhaps it’s worth remembering what John Donne said in a sermon some 400 years ago; you’ve heard it before: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
As the son of a coal miner, I’m glad we still stop what we’re doing to worry, if only a little, about a half dozen diggers of black gold a couple of thousand miles away from where we live. I only wish we could care as much about others among us, whose deaths are discounted. And I wonder how much we’ll care about one another when our numbers reach half a billion, or a billion, or…