I hate numbers. I hate math, algebra, geometry, calculus and even counting. Numbers stink. However, my head often becomes crammed with numbers, filled with useless statistics, like Fred Lynn’s 1979 batting average (.333), years of events, like Robert Deniro’s first Academy Award (1974) and ages of people, like how Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain all died at the same age (27 … brrr …).

Numbers seem to be important in American society. We judge everything by its mathematical worth. You have more money than him, she has more elective credits than you, he weighs more than me, etc.

Numbers play an important part in our world, like it not. And we often think we’re going to find the answers to our problems in numbers. Sometimes we think we can escape our problems by obscuring them in statistics.

Reading through yesterday’s Des Moines Register, I came across a “news analysis” piece ridiculing various groups for over-exaggerating statistics for their own agendas.

This is not news, as far as most of us are concerned. Groups often inflate numbers to serve their own purposes. But how do these statistics serve the purpose of a cause?

People think there is a certain validity to numbers, and to an extent, that holds a grain of truth.

After all, would AIDS be as big an issue and concern as it is today were it not for the escalating number of people contracting the disease? One could argue that the disease did not truly become a mainstream concern until it spread out of the homosexual and drug abusing sectors of society, but these are still indicative of the fact that as the disease became more prevalent, people were more conscious of its disastrous consequences. But do we need numbers to justify or invalidate everything?

The news analysis piece ridiculed a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics that reported that out of 2,000 children between the ages of 10 and 16, one of out four said they had been sexually assaulted or physically abused last year.

Ha ha ha, laughs the author of the piece, as if we’re really going to swallow that one. He points out that it is ridiculous to think there are some six million kids out there being subjected to torture and physical abuse every year. He adds that this survey is especially biased when the definition of abuse used in the survey was stretched beyond rape, molestation and criminal assault to include being shoved by a sibling or participating in a schoolyard fight.

So, the author seems to conclude, the problem of child abuse is not as severe as some would have you believe.

I will agree that the study is probably an invalid one. But should that invalidate the concept that child abuse is a bad thing and we should attempt to eradicate it? I wouldn’t care if there were only one case of child abuse in all of human history, it’s still sick and wrong and should be stopped.

I’ve often wondered why a serial killer who kills 27 people is any worse than somebody who kills, say, one person. Yes, Iwill concede the fact that the number of people someone like Jeffrey Dahmer has killed is indicative of a, er, mental problem, but a monstrous killer is still a monstrous killer, whether he murders once or a thousand times. We should be horrified by such the act, not by how many times the act occurs.

This numbers game became a large factor in the aftermath of the Million Man March on Washington.

Numbers have been flying back and forth about how many people actually participated in the March. March supporters and organizers said there were well over a million people in attendance, while others have estimated the actual number to be as low as 450,000. I say, who cares? Would the fact that there might not have been one million people in attendance made their cause any less justified? Would the fact that there were more than a million people in attendance make their cause any more right?

What is important in today’s society? Numbers or cause? If I were one of the organizers of the Million Man March, I would have answered questions about the number of people in attendance with a big, “So what? We were still participating in something we believed in. We’re social activists, not accountants.”

Does the fact that the murder rates in many large American cities have dropped for the past couple of years make murder less of a concern? Tell that to a murder victim, or their family. Does the fact that six million people died in the Nazi Holocaust make it worse than if the number were, say, half a million?

Why are we so concerned about numbers when it is the events that are important. Crimes are crimes, people are people, actions are actions, and as important as the number of occurrences may be, you won’t find the answer to our problems, only more questions.

These number games, statistics and such are getting us no further in solving our societal dilemmas. You can go on keeping score. I’d rather get in the game.

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Timothy James Davis is a junior from Carlisle. He is the opinion page editor.