Of rhinos, supreme court justices and compassion

As John Donne so eloquently put it: No man is an island,[…] any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. 

It was true back in Donne' late 14^th century when the entire human population was a mere 500 million people, but does it continue to be true today when we are  7 billion? Not really. When I was a little girl there were 70 thousand black rhinos in Africa and nobody talked about conservation or habitat, now there are only 2 thousand left and the world is scrambling to save the few that remain. The less you have of something, the more precious it becomes.  It's the most basic principle of economics and it applies to our appraisal of everything in the world, except, of course, for diamonds, which is a very common stone and has a completely artificial valuation.

There are simply too many people in the world for an individual to be valuable. We've become inured to the tolling of the bell. Compassion used to be a quality, now it is a weakness. And you don't have to go back very far for confirmation of that statement.  Recently I re-watched MASH on Netflix and was struck by the compassion and commitment exhibited by those characters who existed in a world with 70 thousand rhinos. When I watched the series in the 80s the level of compassion and commitment portrayed seemed natural to me as a child living in our society. Now, thirty years later and from the perspective of a somewhat cynical adult in 2016, the compassion and commitment exhibited by those characters seems exaggerated, even caricatured.  That level of compassion simply does not exist in the real world today.  It's gone, and we are not even ashamed of ourselves for allowing it to go extinct. Our compassion is our valuation of the individual.  The more people there are, the less valuable each becomes and the less compassion we feel. There are enough of us now that compassion is more endangered than the black rhino. The tolling of the bell has become background noise that we simply cannot hear.  

Every problem in the world today, from climate change to our intolerance and lack of compassion, can be attributed to the over population of humans on earth.  Think about it.

I've said all of that because I believe it to be true, not because there is something in me that feels guilty about celebrating Scalia's death and is looking for some sort of moral justification or force majeure for skipping around the room singing "ding-dong the witch is dead".