A 40-foot-high wall of water that sweeps...

A 40-foot-high wall of water that sweeps away more than 26,000 human lives makes other aspects of the human condition seem pretty minor. The Indian Ocean’s tsunami naturally was the top story in this and every other newspaper Monday, even though the estimate at that time was only 13,000 lives lost. It takes today’s 26,000 number to apply that macabre “only” to Monday’s 13,000 -- and even so, in our reaction to horrors like this, we heavily discount extra lives when they reach into the thousands. Did anyone’s horror and sadness double when the toll doubled? It’s unlikely. Stalin apparently did not really say that one death is a tragedy but a thousand deaths is a statistic; despite our best intentions, though, it’s true.

And despite those intentions, we (meaning humankind, not the Los Angeles Times editorial page) are incapable of keeping 13,000 or 26,000 deaths at the proper scale in our minds. Though the tsunami led Page 1, there was still room for suburbanites who keep their cars when they move back downtown, among other stories. How can anyone care about suburbanites and their cars on a day when a tsunami has destroyed thousands of lives? We don’t know how, but we (meaning the Los Angeles Times editorial page, not all of humankind) found that story pretty interesting, however shameful that might be. It would be different, of course, if any significant fraction of those lost lives were American. Then the story would have probably taken over the entire front page of U.S. newspapers, and not just for one day.

Last week there was an embarrassing period when we knew that 20 or more people had died in an explosion at a military base in Mosul, Iraq, but we didn’t know their identities. The nation held its collective breath. We hoped for a lower American casualty figure, which meant, if inadvertently, hoping for a higher number of dead Iraqis. Grief’s parochialism isn’t a uniquely American trait -- even our most steadfast allies among the Iraqis had probably hoped for a lower Iraqi casualty total (and consequently a higher American death toll) when they heard of the bombing. Propinquity and consanguinity -- closeness of geography and bloodlines -- increase the value of one human being’s life to another. That’s human nature.

A tsunami is a glamorous natural disaster, and Californians can’t help but pay attention when the subject turns to shifting tectonic plates. But the ongoing hardship facing millions in South Asia is unlikely to command the kind of sustained attention that the death of Laci Peterson did.