Numbers

British Petroleum announced it is on track to scrap five thousand jobs this year, in addition to the nine thousand five hundred that will "move off the payroll". Sooner or later, in the quest to appease the shareholder, there will come a time when overhead will need to be reduced to inflate the profit margin, hence the desire to put scores of individuals on the unemployment line. This latest announcement has me pondering how an entire life can be branded with a single number and treated as such.

Management sits in its boardroom with pages and pages of figures, figuring out how it can do more with less, seemingly unaware that each figure on each page represents a human being, a life much like her/his own, with family and friends and heaps of expenses, of no consequence to the shareholders who care solely about their money. Numbers; they are only numbers: every few weeks, they send a cheque to each number, paying no attention to the life behind that number. One day, it may be decided these numbers earn too much; another, these numbers ought to disappear.

With the government - the gathering of persons hired to serve us - it's the same old story: driver's license number, health card number, passport number, social insurance number, et cetera, et cetera. "Please enter your number into the telephone keypad, so that we may assist you better." Easier said than done when you're talking not to a person but merely a number. Is there any incentive for serving this particular number better when there are a mountain of numbers to be addressed?

Institutions of "higher learning" are no different, save for the direction of monetary flow. To the administration, the students are but numbers: numbers that pay tuition, numbers that receive grades, numbers awarded pieces of paper brazened with our prestigious name and logo, numbers to replaced with new ones. As far as they are concerned, there are no lives behind these numbers: no emotional trouble, no hopes or dreams; just numbers.

Switch on the news, and behold: more numbers. "Sixty-five killed by suicide bomb." "Forty-three percent support the government." "Eighty-five homicides this past year." "One hundred six million people watched the finale of M*A*S*H!" I don't suppose there is sufficient to pay mind to millions upon millions of individual lives; does it mean, though, that we do not bother acknowledging that there are, in fact, lives behind those numbers?

I know what it is to be a number - you do, too - and it brings me nothing but despair. During my previous tour of duty as an undergraduate, a friend of mine suggested I accept the fact that I am and will forever be a number, and there wasn't much I could do about it. Ever since, I've asked myself if, somehow, she could be proven wrong. What does it say of us when we treat one another as such? How did we become so far removed from each other? from ourselves? Is this all for which we have to strive: a string of digits by which we are identified?

We are more than mere numbers: we are us, and we are alive.