Perspective: The meaning behind numbers

A four-figure number hovers 50 feet over a busy Philadelphia street, visible in an office window. It changes maybe once or twice a day like the cost of something. A janitor once stopped, just to stare. "I see that number, and it makes me cry," he told Celeste Zappala, who keeps the running tally.

It is a number that strongly moves American opinion: the U.S. military's death toll in Iraq. Zappala's son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, is one of the dead.

Other makeshift memorials rise up across the country as reminders of the war's human cost: flags planted in honor of the dead on the National Mall in Washington, symbolic tombstones at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, signs with fallen soldiers' names plastered to telephone polls outside Boston.

Americans may question this war for many reasons, but their doubts often find voice in the count of U.S. war deaths. An overwhelming majority -- 84 percent -- worry that the war is causing too many casualties, according to a September poll by the nonpartisan research group Public Agenda.

The country largely kept the faith during World War II, even as about 400,000 U.S. forces died -- 20,000 just in the monthlong Battle of the Bulge. Before turning against the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Americans tolerated thousands more deaths than in Iraq.

Has something changed? Do Americans somehow place higher value on the lives of their soldiers now?

Read the rest at the LA Times