“The mass killings and genocides recur on earth does not mean that they are similar. Each instance of human, moral evil, and each victim’s personal death, possesses its unique history and form. To generalize, as Cynthia Ozick points out, is to “befog” evil’s specificity. Any blurring is dangerous, if inevitable, because the deaths of a few hundred scholars or ten thousand people or one million or thirty million people pain little at diminishing removes of time and place. Shall we contemplate Chinese scholars’ beheadings twenty-three centuries ago? It hurts worse to break a leg.
What, here in the West, is the numerical limit to our working idea of “the individual”? As recently as 1894, bubonic plague killed 13 million people in Asia—the same plague that killed twenty-five million Europeans five and a half centuries earlier. Have you even heard mention of this recent bubonic plague? Can our prizing of each human life weaken with the square of the distance, as gravity does?
Do we believe the individual is precious, or do we not? My children and your children and their children? Of course. The 250,000 Karen tribespeople who are living now in Thailand? Your grandfather? The family of men, women, and children who live in central Asia as peoples called Ingush, Chechen, Buryats, and Bashliks? The people your address book tracks? Any other group you care to mention among the 5.9 billion persons now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion dead?
There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this.”
I was looking at some old photos on slate.com, in light of the anniversary of the events at tiananmen square today 20 years ago. Here are a couple that stood out to me:
this is a picture of the protesting students offering drinks to the soldiers. this is how us brothers and sisters should protest injustice, by countering it with love.
this is some students a couple of weeks before the massacre. they are my age. pictures like this remind me of the acutal person-hood of those involved. each of these people has a life with family and friends who care about them.
dillard warns us about letting people become just a number.
all of us have worth.
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