Deliver us from faraway evil

'Susan Sontag died," my mother murmured, not raising her head from the two-day-old Financial Times I had bought her in the hangarlike waiting room of Juan Santamaria International Airport in San Jose, Costa Rica.

Just the day before, she heard a fellow tourist refer to the ''late" actor Jerry Orbach. ''He isn't dead, is he?" she asked me, and I had no idea. That evening, I snuck into the VIP enclave (''Servicio Real") of our hotel and snitched a day-old Miami Herald. Frazier Moore's Associated Press obituary confirmed that the gravel-voiced Orbach, now famous as detective Lennie Briscoe from ''Law & Order" reruns, had died at age 69.

At 25, Orbach, an up-and-coming song-and-dance man who would later win a Tony award for his role in the musical ''Promises, Promises," starred in the original ''Fantasticks." Who knew?

Oh, and 137,000 people died that same week in a tsunami in Southeast Asia.

''A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." Just because the famous aphorism is attributed to Joseph Stalin doesn't mean it isn't true. It is a commonplace of the pulpit and the editorial page that we are all joined in one great brotherhood of man and woman, that ''each man's joy is joy to me, each man's grief is my own," to cite a popular hymn. But for many years I have wondered if that is true. I think compassion is like a radar signal that loses force the further it radiates from our hearts.

I can easily understand why someone is more affected by the loss of a favorite actor, of a well-regarded talk-show host -- the circulating e-mail tributes to the late David Brudnoy are wonderfully articulate and emotional -- or by the death of an author one has enjoyed, than by the passing of tens of thousands of faraway strangers. In 1994, I remember seeing a picture of dozens of bodies washing over a waterfall during the Rwandan genocide, and reacting with shock and indifference. Those events seemed to be taking place in a galaxy far, far away.

Human apathy toward mass deprivation is legendary. Aid organizations know this. For decades, the relief organization Save the Children has urged first-world donors to underwrite the well-being of a specific child somewhere in the Third World. Why? Because no one cares about saving children in the abstract. But people do care about saving Marzina, an 8-year-old from Bangladesh, who is currently seeking a sponsor.

The media likewise know that gargantuan disaster stories have to be correctly packaged to capture readers' attention. There is an old, politically incorrect saying in newsrooms: How do you change a front-page story about massive flood devastation into a 50-word news brief buried inside the paper? Just add two words: ''In India."

I was in a remote hotel last week and tripped across a news report from Deutsche Welle, Germany's government-supported international network. With tens of thousands of Asians already confirmed dead, DW headlined the disappearance of four Germans in the tsunami. My immediate reaction was: Who cares about four Germans? Answer: The Germans care about the Germans. The Americans care about the Americans. And so on.

Europeans and others sometimes dismiss America's ''overreaction" to the Sept. 11 attacks. Statistically speaking, the losses on 9/11 equaled those during a few hours of one of the European continent's epic land battles. But the impact was felt all over the Eastern seaboard, and all over the country.

A man who lived a few houses down from me died on one of the airliners. Waiting in line to move my son's belongings into his college dorm in New York City a year later, I met several families from New Jersey for whom the memory of the year-old attacks remained painful and dramatic. They hadn't experienced an event, they had lived through a tragedy.

When my family returned home from our vacation on Saturday, we were greeted by a handwritten note from a friend, saying she may have lung cancer. One of my sons burst out crying. Her biopsy was yesterday; as of this writing we don't know the results. For us, that's a tragedy. The rest is news.

From Boston.com