The Face of a Memorial

Yesterday was Memorial Day. The legacy and cost of wars as public policy decisions can be told in gruesomely sterile bar graphs. It is relatively easy to discuss and analyze an issue by aggregating the participants and then slicing and dicing them in the pursuit of answers and pseudo-conclusions. War merits inspection on an n=1 basis as well. Even though that sort of inspection is difficult and expensive, and even though its results are not readily translated into things like bar graphs and statistical tables, it remains necessary. This is particularly so given the sense that our armed forces draw their volunteers from increasingly narrow demographic subsets. Considering the individual soldier, even (perhaps especially) if she is not personally known to the considerer, is worthwhile and valuable.

Individualized humans can communicate messages to other humans that statistical humans cannot, and, in the course of placing at risk human lives, regard of the former ought at least to compliment analysis of the latter.

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