Sympathy

Planes are falling like flies lately. MH370 was lost to the watery deep, MH17 met a fiery end and today another Taiwanese plane was crushed by stormy weather. The whole world is a bit more sullen today.

The question is, why do we feel such sympathy when planes go down? After all tens of thousands of people die every day in the poor countries, from starvation and disease and war. These corpses dwarf those that perish in the skies by far.

I suppose the reason is that we simply cannot identify with them - these people are just fundamentally different from our middle-class existence, unlike air travelers who could be you or me or a family member. The more someone is like us, the more we sympathize with them. That is why terrorist attacks shock us so much, as people who were a moment ago enjoying their comfortable urban existence are suddenly injured or dead, to their great surprise. People who die in war zones, well it is a tragedy, but that is somehow only to be expected, right?

A ton of people doing research on AIDS died on MH17. I could not help but think that if someone who suffered from AIDS was on board too, many would feel far more sympathy for his death than if it had been from the disease, because "AIDS wouldn't happen to me, only to druggies/gays". That's just human nature.