I'm A Killer

I don’t consider myself a murderer, but I am a killer. I’m not a vegetarian. I sometimes wear leather. And while these are relatively mild confessions, I cross a significant line each April 15 when I pay my income tax (like the obedient citizen I’ve been raised to be). When you consider that the U.S. Department of Defense budget accounted in fiscal year 2009 for about 21% of the United States federal budgeted expenditures and 27% of estimated tax revenues, I think you begin to get my drift. I financially support the killing of hundreds of thousands of human beings every time I obey the law of the land. This doesn’t even begin to take into account the number of people who starve to death so that I may eat my way into obesity, the unknown thousands who die of disease and poverty so that I may sustain my moderate “middle class” lifestyle in the United States. While intent defines murder, I’m not so sure but what it may be even more insidious to kill without it. I am intrinsically woven into the web of life, and yet I ignorantly and callously enjoy a way of life that is at the expense of the lives of others. We humans flatter ourselves as the apex of creation, and yet our history in relative terms is but a twinkling of an eye. We are such cunning and capable killers that we may simply be forecasting our extinction. Our serious repentance, not just in word but through a conversion which reveres life as sacred, may be our only redemption.