I’m not very likely to vote, and I spend a lot of time chatting online. I know I should probably be aware of what’s going on in the world and get involved somehow, but I’m a busy person and weekends are for beer pong.

The 28-year-old actor’s death on Tuesday hit the nytimes.com home page that evening and was regularly updated — I know because I hit refresh constantly after hesitantly breaking the news to my roommates and group-texting a farewell message to some of my friends. Just as I’d suspected, most of them already knew — they’d set their Facebook.com status to “thinking about Heath Ledger” and were already inviting me to memorial groups.

No one can say it isn’t sad when an innocent person dies before his or her time.

I realize that many people die every day. Just last week, nearly 30 Palestinians were killed from Israel’s response to 250 rocket attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Five thousand people die every month in Darfur, although that’s a far cry from postwar Congo’s estimated 45,000 per month from hunger and disease, according to the International Rescue Fund.

I’m not trying to trivialize anyone’s death, but rather to put things in perspective.

Not just Heath Ledger, the person, died Tuesday. More importantly — to me at least — Heath Ledger’s ability to make me laugh and cry, as well as melt like caramel in the sun when he removed his shirt, died Tuesday. Watching his hilarious role in “Lords of Dogtown” on Dec. 27 thrilled me enough to push from my mind the assassination of Pakistan presidential hopeful Benazir Bhutto. (Apparently Bhutto was running against some dictator or something and trying to reform democracy there).

The No. 1 killer worldwide is malaria, a preventable disease, but if you want to know what I’m really thinking: What have any of those victims done for me lately? My friends and I have been regularly wooed by Ledger’s Hollywood hottie status since his 2000 performance in “The Patriot,” the same year Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Yugoslavia and eventually tried for war crimes including genocide.

To have any sort of relationship with these people, I’d have to get involved by joining one of the outreach groups on campus, such as SCOUTBANANA, and that could be more depressing than watching Ledger play a heroin addict in “Candy!”

To be fair, I know that everyone, including those “call-to-action” activist types, think Ledger’s death is a tragedy. They also probably think his contributions to cinema were laudable and even helped open the public to important issues through his portrayals of characters like identity-shamed Ennis Del Mar in “Brokeback Mountain.”

Everyone should applaud his good work as a single individual, even among the many who perish from conflict, disease and malnutrition.

But to the average American college student, the number of deaths doesn’t matter. What matters is the ability to make them feel emotional. And not emotional in that “our entire society was destroyed and it could have been prevented” sort of way. That depression leaves you thinking you have some sort of responsibility to take on. I mean in the way we come to love an evil-turned-romantic persona in “10 Things I Hate About You.”

I know every death is a tragedy. But even living in the country with the most power, aid and protection, I’m more interested in the death of a Hollywood celebrity than a continent in crisis. It’s easier not to know about the thousands of Afghani and Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers dying every month, or the Blackwater mercenaries using riot gas on them.

I don’t take seriously or perhaps don’t care about being in a position to spend time helping strangers, American or foreign. I don’t yet realize the fulfillment gained from knowing I did what I could to help.

Maybe that should change.

Drew Robert Winter is a State News columnist. Reach him at winterdr@msu.edu.