Death brings life into perspective, but it’s curious how we
as a culture deal with death.
The coverage of mass killings brings us the horror of the
event, the individuality of the victims, the sorrow of the survivors and
witnesses and the sense of national tragedy. All soon fades away absent vigorous
dialogue about how to solve these
problems.
A young girl hangs herself. She is press worthy for a day
with little supporting narrative. There is hardly a word about the kind of
culture in which this could happen and about the tens of thousands of other
similar stories that could be told.
Children across the world die of disease and malnutrition or
die from attacks by guns, drones and jets. We might dig through the news to
discover their stories, but we are often the perpetrators and they are not a
part of us.
We create the cultures in which these things happen. We
decide how far beyond healing words we are willing to go to find solutions. We
decide how far out to cast the net of our own sense of who is brother.
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