Stalin Was Wrong. Rough Version

In interest of journalistic purity, I am transcribing verbatim something that I wrote and believe in wholeheartedly. There are a million things I want to change but for a good place to start this off, a rough draft sounds good to me. So, without wasting any more time, I present:

Stalin Was Wrong V. 0.1

For a long time I agreed with [Josef] Stalin's statement that "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Now, I have realized that this is not that case at all. A reason why I was lead to this was when I was contemplating the idea of a million people. Trying to imagine a million of anything, besides dollars, is mind boggling. But to imagine a million people, all who have their own likes, dislikes, and anything else that makes us who we are and to that a million fold and then all snuffed out in incomprehensible. This is all stemming from trying to come to terms with the amount of death that was involved with the Holocaust. Six million, SIX million Jews were executed and SIX million other people were killed as well. The idea of TWELVE MILLION people being killed over a span of about seven years is such a hard concept to grasp. To try to get an idea of how much just one million is, I thought of everyone in my life that I had met and I can't truthfully say I have known more than say, 1,000-1,500 in my life. The idea that everyone I know/ever known would disappear in an instant and then some really puts some perspective to the idea of 12 million deaths. This campus [SUNY Oneonta] has about 7,000+ so, that is not even close to half a million. 12 million is the population of New York City times 1.5 (the population being 8 million.) disappearing forever. You would be hard-pressed to meet just 1 million people in your life, let alone 12. And say you did this feat, having all those people disappear from your life is such an incredible concept to imagine.