Social Security numbers, telephone numbers, street and license numbers, miles per gallon. Numbers ad infinitum. Think about all the numbers that pass through your life as a matter of course on a daily basis. Take a number. Someone will be with you shortly has become an all too familiar chorus.

Polls are constantly being conducted and their results reduced to numerical equations. The economy is up. The President’s popularity is down a point. Television programs are statistically rated according to number of people watching.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, publishes an employment summary which lists unemployment by occupation, class of worker, race, sex, and age. Such information must be important for some reason. And let’s not forget the baseball stats of number of runs, errors, outs, times at bat, and the odds of hitting a pitch. And this vital information is gathered for each of the other sports from the professional to college teams.

Americans tabulate the number of times people have sex per year by age, married, unmarried, and by nation. We know how many pounds of sugar, meat, poultry, and fish we consume. Consumption stats are available for every kind of product on the market.

We proudly announce how many hits our websites have had daily, weekly, and monthly. We toot the number of combatant enemy killed as opposed to the number of our own troops killed as if they were football scores.

The number of inches of rain and snow are blasted over the radio and television. But what really takes the news is the number of women a certain male celebrity has slept with. For what purpose do we continue to feed this endless statistical trivia into the mind set of our nation? Do they tell us who we are? Maybe! Robots All?

The continued reduction to mere numbers reduces the human equation; demeaning it to a conglomerate of molecular structures.