We Have Made "One Hundred and Twenty Million" Too Easy to Say

There is a mercy in big numbers and a danger in it too. The mercy is that "past a hundred and twenty million" lets us hold the scale of this displacement in a single breath. The danger is that a figure that large slides off the mind like water off glass, and we mistake having heard it for having felt it. I do not want the count sounded as an alarm — this paper is right that a siren pulled too often stops being heard. But I do not want it filed as furniture either. Somewhere between panic and indifference lies the honest register: a number kept accurately, and read slowly. This week the Concordat argued over who counts as a migrant, markets priced the water those migrants will need, and a choir in Lagos put names to forty of them. All three, in their way, were arguments against abstraction. The task the number sets us is not to be shocked by it. It is to refuse to round it down to nothing.