“You should concentrate on us, we suffer more” - black feminist, speaking to a white feminist (actual quote)

Does there exist a metaphysical ruler by which we may measure distress? Perhaps the homeless guys I saw in the park tonight should take their case before the local magistrate, state it plainly: “Actually your honour, it is we who are more wretched by far. I'm lying here out in the open in a fucking sleeping bag, so for chrisskes please turn your attention to us!”. On one hand I grasp the concept that certain groups in society are disadvantaged, sometimes terribly, by the unfavourable laylines and pathways of power, and on the other it strikes me as incongruous to think of pain as occurring to anything other than individuals. Maybe we need a metric to decide where our priorties should lie, some kinda definite quantifiable number: millilitres of tears shed per a capita, adjusted for inflation.

Which is worse: racism or sexism? homelessness or violence? I wonder just how far we should divide things, start giving preferential treatment to the solvent abusers over the regular old alcoholics. Group people by their AIDS status. You can draw as many lines as you want, slice the pie chart into tatters and still find yourself a thousand decimal places away from the reality of THIS person's cancer, THIS person's hunger, THIS persons experience of being lost, cold, abandoned, and alone.

It's not that these things aren't great evils, or that nothing should be done about them. It's that the idea that there exists a hierarchy of victimhood revolts me. There is a natural tendency to myopia in these situations, and there's nothing wrong with that. Of course the issues that affect you personally will seem, from your perspective, more important. But trying to barter this into an objective statement seems cold and unfeeling. It fails to recognize the reality of others or that they may also have problems, problems which will be, at least to them, inevitably far more pressing than those of your own.

Like the battlefield principle of triage, do we let some bleed out on their stretches so that we may attempt to salvage the rest?

You can't feed a family on rhetoric.