When you live in the least populated state in the country, it is easy to possibly over-value the importance of a single individual.

         We live in a world of 7 billion people. And in a country of 310 million. Next to that, our paltry population of 568,000 in Wyoming would seemingly put more importance on each individual than more populous places.

         California, for example, has 37 million people in that state.

         A 2011 story in the New York Times said that Wyoming citizens were, by far, the most powerful people in the country. They printed a small map (which I would like to get hold of) showing the states by proportion of their Congressional clout. 

After all, here in Wyoming we have two U.S. Senators, one per 284,000 people while California has one per 18.5 million people. That makes a typical Wyomingite 65 times more influential than a typical Californian, when it comes to making laws in Washington, D. C.

         But it is not just here in Wyoming that sometimes the individual is valued as much as the state.

         It even comes into play as to how much value we place on our individual men and women serving in wars across the sea.

         Most Americans are relieved to see our soldiers coming home from Iraq. Soon, we will see them coming home from Afghanistan, too.

         Not sure President Barack Obama handled all this in the best way possible, but still we are glad to have our folks out of harm’s way.

         Some 4,500 Americans died in the Iraq conflict in a nine-year war.

         My, how things have changed when it comes to warfare.

         Lately I have been reading books that relate to warfare and some statistics are so staggering that maybe they need to be mentioned.

         I bring this up because we now live in “the time of the individual” whereas in the past, it seems the individual did not count. All that mattered a century or two ago was the state or the country or the empire.

Another example of the power of the individual was Israel trading 1,000 Palestine political prisoners for one Israeli soldier being held as a POW.

         But back to some remarkable statistics. Here are some stats from some recent readings.

         In Ken Follett’s new best seller Fall of the Giants, a lot of time is spent dwelling on World War I. In one battle at Verdun in France, over 300,000 French and German soldiers were killed. Another half million were wounded in the 1916 event.

         It was an artillery battle with over 40 million shells launched by the two armies.

         Other battles were almost as terrible but Verdun stands alone when it comes to statistics like these.

         The battle in Argonne Forest was the worst World War I battle for Americans with more than 125,000 casualties from all Allied countries. 

         Austria, which started the war in response to the assassination of one of its princes, lost 300,000 men in 1914 alone.

         In another passage early in the book, it is reported that the Russian Second Army surrendered to a German force. Over 92,000 Russians surrendered. Often the Germans did not have enough soldiers to guard their prisoners.

In an audio book about the Civil War, narrator George C. Scott reported that the battle of Antietam early in the war saw 23,000 American casualties, counting both sides. It was the bloodiest single day of the Civil War.

The numbers of soldiers killed in previous wars compared to today just seem so breathtaking. It is like as the population of the world doubled, which would seemingly make life less precious, it has become much more precious.

Probably the expansion of modern media has a lot to do with the development of this attitude plus, obviously, the way modern warfare is conducted.

But it is not just soldiers who died in these previous wars.

         Another book I am reading is The Rape of Nanking, which reports about how when Japan invaded China in 1937. The Japanese soldiers systematically murdered over 300,000 men, women and children in seven weeks. And they did it in the most terrible ways imaginable.

         Not sure all this is all that interesting, but I could not help but notice the large numbers jumping off the pages of these books as I was reading them.

         Life is so precious. Just amazing to think that 70 years ago, the life of an individual apparently was just not worth that much.