I was shocked at Elton Wong’s April 7 column. Such columns fly in the face of the multiculturalism our university prides itself in. Mr. Wong inquires about the value “ratio” of an American life to that of a non-American.

He comments, “I hope someone has made these calculations because otherwise, we’d have nothing to base our foreign policies on except guesswork and wishy-washy ideas about values.”

Human lives are not measurable, Mr. Wong; you can’t say one life is worth less than another.

What shocked further is you suggested that politicians get busy “calculating how much money each life, American and non-American, is worth.”

Do not conclude that people in Sierra Leone, Congo and Sudan must “not have been worth American lives” because you didn’t read about it the newspapers.

Blame it on a media which propagates certain ideas while dismissing others for political reasons.

I bet the hundreds of Palestinians lost with the Intifadah in 1987 and after the 1994 peace accords with Israel didn’t make your newspapers.

The U.S. can’t play policeman and discriminate between lives in country X and the lives in country Y; just like a policeman should not discriminate between blacks, hispanics and whites.

Your conclusion that Americans should solely think about their money, economy and “astronomically high standard of living” reflects a naive ethnocentrism that is fortunately not generally representative of the U.S.

Aref Al Farra

Graduate student

Economics