Background Report - Arizona Town Hall

Who’s That Good-Looking Pie Chart
Walking Down the Hall?
We get lost in the wandering story,
Small, individual, unbalanced, personal
Equations that we are,
Lost in the graphs, the full-color charts,
The electronic bytes and latest trends
Busily narrating us.
Because of them, we know much,
But should also know better.
What we know is less than what we will know.
Charts begin with people
And end with people.
But in between, they are not people.
And yet, we explain ourselves in these ways—
As if our insides were a meat of numbers
Holding us up, a bone construct
Working within allowable tolerances,
Our lungs, our livers,
Our lives more statistical than actual,
We walking around
As handsome percentages of ourselves,
Beautiful portions of our futures.
We do this anyway: We let numbers
Enchant us, be our best novelists,
X-rays our best art.
But they are us.
They are us. And let’s just be messy
And say it again: They are us.
Chapter 1 | 33