The Killing Season

A growing interest of mine is the qualitative perception of death by human beings. We definitely assess certain kinds of death as worse than others. This fact started seeping into my consciousness in the wake of 9/11. The death of those 3,000 souls was deemed “bad” enough to warrant the United States’ preemptive attack upon the sovereign nation of Iraq followed by a war that continues to this day. The death of U.S. military personnel is “worse” than the death of Iraqi civilians, at least when the media attention given to both is compared to the actual numbers. Back in the United States, we slaughter somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 each year in automobile accidents, but this seems to be a more acceptable loss than, say, the 14,274 murders committed in 2002. This is again an issue as the Christmas killings in Nebraska and Colorado take on a more poignant significance because of the season in which they occurred. Any time a gunman goes berserk is tragic, but when it occurs in the midst of the celebration of new life for joy, hope, love and peace it is understandably weighted more heavily than if it happened in June. It’s beginning to dawn on me that this must serve to explain to a greater or lesser degree the diminishing reverence for life that seems to accompany an exponentially growing human population. Of course our prayers are with the families and friends of the victims of recent yuletide tragedies, but our better understanding of the reason for the season is more apt to take place when we begin to regard the phenomenon of leaving this earthly plane with greater equality.