People have an enormous inertia for almost anything, no matter how trivial. It's a wonder anything gets done. I'll pick an issue out of a hat. Let's say I sh

People have an enormous inertia for almost anything, no matter how trivial. It's a wonder anything gets done. I'll pick an issue out of a hat. Let's say I show your average member of the United States a photo array of one hundred seventeen (117) dead infants. I tell you they all died of a single cause. People make sounds. I say "This happens every year, to roughly this degree." Wow! More noises are made. People sound like they want to do something about it. Write to senators, pass laws, protest. But when I get down to brass tacks and say, "Hey, those are all boys. That's how many die from circumcision each year, roughly, in the United States. And by the way, the NNT (number needed to treat) is pretty high, you need a least a hundred circumcisions to prevent just one urinary tract infection." And it all will just stop. New noises, about religious freedoms, and tradition, and the son looking like his father, and "won't he be made fun of?" appear in place of the original noises. And I could say, "It's only done maybe one in ten times in Europe, civilization hasn't ended there" and it won't make a lick of difference. It's not about guns or anything else, people just don't like to change, even over some fairly trivial business. I'd be willing to lay odds that nobody reading this comment who was pro-circumcision has changed their minds. And I would not be shocked for almost any issue that I selected would have a similar outcome. Are people more callous than they are unwilling to change? Perhaps. Are they burned out from hearing Sarah McLachlan's voice starting off an ASCPA commercial, and, in a parallel to Terror Management Theory, most people will, to some degree or another, shut themselves off from a vast and bewildering array of suffering against which they could make only the most ineffectual showing, knowing that for every bit of effort they expend, it will not reach millions of humans and other creatures whose life is primarily one of grim endurance and a kind of mute hope? I could not tell you.