The Spreadsheet Has Never Met the Family

Counting suffering is not the sin; letting a neat total stand in for the people is. The line attributed to Prince Harry in Kyiv makes the plain moral point: behind a statistic are lives, families, and futures changed. Yet public speakers can present a clean column as if the column has done the grieving for us. The spreadsheet is very composed. It has never had to sit with the family.

At the church-basement potluck, a spreadsheet may count the empty chairs. It cannot explain them away, or tell us what future was interrupted. Numbers can help us see the scale; they cannot make the people behind the total into rounding errors. Mercy means remembering who is missing, even when the arithmetic is tidy.