It’s generally acknowledged that
Mark Twain popularized the phrase, “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Those words are often used to bolster weak
arguments through the use of statistics.
The reason this phrase came to my
mind is because I recently lost another person on my list of acquaintances,
friends, relatives, lovers, and enemies.
This list is getting shorter and shorter by the day, and I needed a bit
of sane analysis for this trend.
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| Nothing says "class" like a camouflage-lined casket |
Recalling some of the television
and radio programs I regularly tune-in, many have been fixated on health
matters, lately.
In recent years, America
Magnetic pink ribbons and nearly
non-stop public service announcements repeatedly blast public America
Just a few short years prior, we
were inundated with the socially conscious of us wearing cheesy rubber
bracelets, whose sale money went toward financing that ever-elusive cure.
Those causes included too many to
mention here, but incorporated cancer, heart disease, spousal abuse, and clean
water.
But to get back to those statistical
mistruths from Mr. Twain, I thought it would be prudent to visit the
interweb. (Yep, I just conjured that word up.)
I quickly located many sites
willing to help me get to the basics of why people die.
I queried “Number one killer in America
Oddly enough, boredom from
watching Alec Baldwin movies was not one of them.
The answer from the U.S. Center
for Disease Control was heart disease. There
were all sorts of varying qualifiers, though.
“In 2003, over 1,000,000 American men died of heart disease or one of
nine other leading causes of death.”
Huh?
“Men are more likely than women
to die from most of these causes.”
So what are those other
nine? Cancer, unintentional injuries,
stroke, COPD, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, suicide, kidney disease, and
Alzheimer’s disease, is the list the CDC provided, in that order.
So I checked on the number one
cause of death among women in America
It seems as though heart disease
is also numero uno in killing women.
But, but, but…
Yes, heart disease, not breast cancer, not poor parallel parking skills, not spending too much on purses; heart disease is the number one
killer of women in America
So armed with this newly acquired
powerful information I set out to get to something definitive.
Men’s Health states “men are
victims in 4 out of 5 homicides. For
African American men, who are victims 7 times more often than European American
men, homicide is the fourth leading cause of death, and the number one killer for
those ages 15 to 24.”
I read and reread this above
paragraph seven times and now I’m only 40% sure about half of what I could
comprehend. There’s nothing like
twisting the “facts.”
It just seems smarmy when
statisticians need to include not only sex, but race in their formulae to
justify making a point.
After all this combing the
interweb, I discovered Mr. Twain was correct in his evaluation of number data.
And, I now realize everyone is going to die regardless of the cause.
Bottom line: Just enjoy life
while you can and hope you’re not a friend or acquaintance of mine, otherwise
your days appear to be numbered.
