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Is the life of a newborn worth more than that of an addict? The life of a teacher more than that of a CEO? The life of a farmer more than that of an unemployed man living in a city, whose only crop is hope that today will somehow be different?
Is this the right question to ask? How can we place value on life, human or otherwise? Isn’t that a karmically precarious position in which to place ourselves?
Yet, in a culture consumed by capitalism, we do it all the time. A stand of trees is measured in board feet. A mountain of stone is measured by the value of the minerals it hides. A flock of birds, a species of shellfish, the quality of the water we drink… using a financial yardstick, we make value decisions that affect both human and nonhuman life.
We are a nation that now idealizes violence and war, and values these far above peace.
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How about when it comes to war? What is the value of the lives of the ones who fight? What is the cost — not only in terms of money, but in terms of opportunities lost, of trauma, of derangement and estrangement from family, earth, and self?
The time has come to ask some hard questions. After all, we haven’t had a President without “his” war in decades, if ever. Why is this so?
Consider a child who gets in a fight. He’s in first grade and, in his defense, he says an older kid pushed him and tried to take his lunch money. “It was self-defense,” he says.
So, you take him aside and make certain that he has all the tools he needs to refrain from fighting, if possible. You tell him that yes, it’s ok to defend himself and make sure he has what he needs to avoid such things, if at all possible, in the future.
But the same thing happens in second grade, and then third. “He shoved a girl in front of me,” “he scowled at me,” the excuses go.
You notice that the provocations to battle become smaller every time.
In fourth grade, the child discovers the gym. He’s young, but he goes. While there, he meets other people who tell him how to become better at fighting. He is a good student.
Outside the gym, many people who care for him are willing to teach him how to avoid unnecessary conflict. But as the child matures into a fifth, sixth and seventh grader, he seems uninterested and the fights only continue. In fact, as he matures into his high-school years, they increase in terms of violence and frequency.
And it’s always the “other guy’s fault.”
We send our children to die for a few clicks on a spreadsheet.
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How long do we believe the kid? At what point do we realize the young man has emotional issues that are going unaddressed?
If the child has parents that love him, they won’t wait very long to take stock of the reality of the situation. They’ll reject these excuses and take radical action, if necessary.
If the parents are lazy, distracted, self-centered or otherwise unaware, the child may grow into full adulthood as a violent person. The parents might one day find themselves awaiting the verdict of a judge in a murder trial as they watch their son on the defendants’ stand, eyes hollow and devoid of hope, but with anger around their caged and bloodshot edges.
We are a nation that now idealizes violence and war, and values these far above peace. Once, it was easier to believe that we went to war to preserve freedom, ours or others’. With the onset of easy and abundant information, anyone honest and sincere can find out that this is not the case.
Now, we send our children to die for a few clicks on a spreadsheet, a few bonus dollars to shareholders or CEOs, stable oil prices or the ever-present, ever vague, “to protect our interests abroad.”
How long are we going to believe that politicians, who never find themselves at the front lines, value the lives of our soldiers enough to use war as a last resort, instead of an initial response? As a solemn declaration, rather than as a political pawn?
On this Memorial Day, it’s time we reconsider what value we place on the words of our political leaders. The excuses are no longer working and the lives of the humans and non-humans on both sides of potential and present conflict are worth the discomfort of hard questions.
Life is simply too valuable to accept the excuses we’ve been hearing, any longer.
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Photo: Getty Images