Being Struck

This past week I have been struck by humanities ability to treat each other like garbage. I don't mean petty things like, talking behind a friends back, or stealing someone else's food from the refrigerator. I mean real acts of viciousness towards other people.

In social marketing class we watched a documentary by Ross Kemp that began as a look at the politics and aftermath of Kenya's election. The documentary turned heartbreaking when Ross came upon the "glue kids" a group of children that lived literally in a trash pile and huffed glue. http://sky1.sky.com/show/ross-kemp-meets-the-glue-kids-of-kenya In one scene a mother handed a glue bottle to her toddler. The children described how their parents had been murdered in front of them and now they had to deal with weekly if not daily beatings from older kids and the police in the area.

The next day we went over "the troubles" in Northern Ireland. We watched a video where a man admitted to killing another man, hacking him to bits, for the sole reason that he was a Catholic. I remember when I was younger hearing a news story about a bomb going off in a girls Catholic middle school. How could a person bring them selves to believe it was OK, that is was right and just to kill a group of little girls.

Thinking about this I came across an article by a radio talk-show host from my hometown. http://robarnieanddawn.com/newsite/robsoapbox.html In the article he descries his disgust at a woman tweeting that she was happy to have had a miscarriage so that she wouldn't have to go through the inconvenience of having an abortion.

I was then given an assignment on personhood, and its effect on beginning and end of life issues, meaning abortion and assisted suicide. The paper I had to present on discussed that personhood means you can plan for the future and envision yourself in the future. That means anyone who cannot envision a future for themselves from the depressed to the mentally retarded are not people. The paper went on to outline the theory that because a human being has lost their personhood they have also lost their right to live and the right to expect others to care for them.

It is strange how things happen all together.

Whether we define someone or something as a person shouldn’t make a damn bit of difference in how we treat them. The glue kids in Africa are massacred and left to starve because they are less than people to their society. The Catholics in Northern Ireland are seen by some as barbarians who can be chopped up like pieces of meat without a thought. It is how we justify abortion, no woman should have to go through being raped, but that doesn’t make the murdering of a baby any less heartbreaking. It shouldn’t be easy to have an abortion, I have had to bring a friend, who felt they had no other option, and it is not inconvenient. It is like having a piece of your soul ripped out as my friend put it.

Whether it is your mother, or a friend, or a homeless man, or your dog, or a lizard on the road, you should not feel good about hurting any of these. Killing for food or to protect oneself is necessary but it is never good to kill or hurt someone. It should feel awful, it should tug at the veins around your heart, it should feel like a bit of your soul has been ripped out.