We should do something about the thousands of children dying daily

Malaria delenda est

1

Laying in his bed, he knew he was probably going to die. His fever of 104 and unbearable shaking made it clear. He was quite familiar with unpleasant disease, and knew they didn’t always indicate death. But he knew that this one did. That this one would be his downfall.

The headaches had been there for a while. But they’d just gotten worse. When the high fever began, it was obvious—he had malaria. And a particularly nasty case of it.

It was all so unfair. His unbearable headache and horrendous nausea comprised by far his worst experience yet. And it was likely to be his last.

The boy was quite gifted for one his age. He had been proficient in basic mathematics since he was 4. He was currently 7. His parents had also suffered the disease. They had gotten better, after being sick for weeks. He, however, was unlikely to be so lucky.

The boy had a surprising knowledge of geopolitics for one so young. It angered him. The way that his disease was perfectly curable, if that far away bastard had just endured three months of unpleasantness. If they had just been willing to undergo the three month surgery, it would have saved his life.

But that monster Tom had been unwilling to do so. He had been unwilling to undergo this surgery to save his life.

The boy had lots of aspirations. He wanted to go to university, study physics, and uncover the mysteries of the universe. Reading about astronomy had always fascinated him deeply. He wasn’t able to read very much about it, but he dreamed of a world in which he could study it in depth. He was very motivated.

Yet lying in his bed it was clear those hopes were all for nothing. He was not going to be able to study astronomy. Nor physics. The story of his life would be a tragedy. A gifted boy who lived to be 7 years old, before dying a painful death. It was so sad.

His parents grieved. His siblings grieved. Yet they could not do anything. His death was imminent. The boy himself was very sad. Yet more than that he was angry. Angry at Tom.

Tom had had the blood type that allowed him to save the boy’s life. Yet he had chosen not to do so. He had valued avoiding a slightly painful few months more than he valued the life of the boy. This flagrant display of selfishness was not just an inconvenience. It meant the end of the boy’s life was imminent.

The boy thought more thoughts. They were not intelligible enough to be portrayable by writing—the confusion had set in. Yet one thought that he came back to, time and time again, was rage at Tom’s apathy. Could you really blame him?

The boy would have made a great physicist. However, that was not what he became. He became just another child, dead at 7, from a preventable disease.

2

Are we all in agreement that Tom should have endured the few months of unpleasantness to save the boy’s life? That his failure to do so was something quite pernicious. That the death of a child is horrific enough that we should endure sacrifices to prevent it.

I’d assume that we are. However, the horror of Tom’s actions was underestimated by the boy. Tom did not need to endure a painful surgery for months to prevent the boy’s death. In reality, Tom just needed to forego a vacation that he would have enjoyed. Surely, the boy’s rage is justified.

It turns out, that many of us are in a situation like Tom. We have the opportunity to save the life of a child, at the cost of foregoing a vacation. We ought to do so.

The cost to save the life of a child, who would otherwise die of malaria, is $4500. You can, right now, save a child’s life, for a small percent of the cost of a cheap car. Doing so seems to be a moral imperative.

The average person can, if they donate ten percent of their income, save hundreds of lives over the course of their lifetime. They ought to do so. The life of hundreds of children matters more than luxuries afforded by an extra 10% of income.

Imagine that the people dying were your cousins, siblings, or self. Would you not see it as a moral failure of epic proportions that people failed to donate. That people valued a few thousand dollars more than your life.

I’m quite glad I did not die when I was five. Let’s give a few thousand dollars to give others the same courtesy.

Jeffrey Dahmer was horrific. He killed 17 people. Most people can, via donation, save more lives than were ended by Jeffrey Dahmer. You can, on a middle class income, take an action so great that it more than offsets some of history’s most brutal serial killers.

I left the boy in the story unnamed. They represent lots of people, in very similar circumstances to the one they were in. Be the reason that the unnamed boy lives past 7.