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I saw a video a few days ago of young girls dead, one with her head blown open. They had been sisters (and still were), but were no longer part of our collective humanity here on earth. This happened because some other people had made hard choices which they knew would condemn them, or someone like them, to death. Men were carrying their limp bodies, and someone was filming it because they wanted other people to see what people do.
It does not matter here, truthfully, who they were, who those who condemned them were, or why this tragic choice was made. They had been two sovereign, beautiful and alive children, like children everywhere. What happened to them has happened to children throughout history, from the sack of ancient cities to the pogroms of the Medieval world, to the ethnic cleansings of the Americas and central Africa, to the concentration camps of Europe, to wars and tragedies of Asia and the Middle East. This is about how we respond to them.
The very worst we can do is find excuses to minimize the tragedy. I have watched a baby dying of tetanus, in a place where there was no pain relief, no drugs to paralyze and intubate, nothing that could be done to dull the agony of an infant wracked with horrific spasms. It is, I think, the worst thing I have seen; I have not witnessed such pain before or since. It was the result of what the parents did, which was the result of a cultural practice that was misguided and stupid, but that is completely irrelevant to the child. To minimize this due to the parents’ fault or mistake would be idiocy. I think the people carrying those girls’ bodies were trying to get this message across.
At present, we are witnessing a lot of idiots. We are seeing children dying in wars and unrest. Social media is replete with posts minimizing this because this group had done something to that group, or vice versa. Somehow, a prior wrong means that the agony and pain inflicted on a child is less of a tragedy. Somehow, a child is held guilty for the perceived crimes of others and, because of the actions of others, is considered of intrinsically less worth. This child is worth this much, while that other child is worth something else.
Some of the people I have most respected in recent years have joined this chorus. After standing for bodily autonomy through Covid mandates and medical authoritarianism, they are now reclassifying humans into those more worthy and those less so. Perhaps they had never fully understood why they were standing, or what they were standing against. Suddenly country, religious dogma, ethnic group or color becomes a more important definition of human worth than humanity itself. God becomes a deity of a certain historical narrative rather than a God over all. A reaper commissioning the enlightened to sort the wheat from the chaff, rather than a Father gathering his children around Him.
Each child in Darfur, Yemen, the villages of central Africa, Gaza or Israel is a child of us all, and as a child it is illogical, unless we are not all equal, to consider one as more or less innocent than another. Our duty as adults is to understand that. It is also, sometimes, to carry out actions that result in these tragedies in an attempt to avoid worse tragedies. These are not a game of numbers, but must be of values, compassion and truth.
We will not stop the violent deaths of children; that has been part of humanity for a hundred thousand years. But we can reduce the pain and minimize the corruption that our failures cause. We can start to do this when we care enough about humanity that we stop categorizing children on a scale of worth. Put away this callous emptiness that has poisoned so many, and look into each bloodied face and see and understand the pain.
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