Deciding on Death

September 9--Well, that title sounds a bit ominous.  It could mean many things.  Am I starting to sound suicidal here?  Because I'm not.  Decidedly not.  I've thought about it at times in my life; who hasn't?  Okay, never mind; probably some people haven't.

It could mean deciding on euthanasia when in the last throes of a painful, terminal disease, but that wasn't what I had in mind either, although I have no problem with that decision.

What I was considering, in deciding on "Deciding on Death" as a title, was our rationale for killing, depending on the circumstances and our assessment of the victim's value.  Okay, now I think it's really starting to sound ominous.  But maybe it is, and maybe that's where I'm going with this.

Daddy long-legs spiders are dispensable.  There are many of them.  I'm not worried about their existence.  Therefore, like deer to a hunter, they're easy to kill (for Marc, anyway; but I do have to admit that even I--if one inadvertently gets sucked up into a vacuum cleaner--will dismiss it with a cavalier, "Oops, sorry spider.").

Caterpillars, if there are hoards of them erasing the green from branches of all the trees, are easy enough to despise, and when I was involved in my spring of genocide I found myself thinking a lot about the term "dehumanize".  Not that one can technically dehumanize caterpillars; they're not human to begin with.  But it's what I did, nonetheless.  I vilified them, maligned them, discredited them and downgraded them to the status of, well, worms.  When we think of something as a worm, when we stereotype and denigrate any group of living beings, it facilitates the potential decision to eliminate them.

Sunday it will have been 10 years since the attack on the World Trade Center that took so many lives.  To the terrorists who planned and carried out the attack, Americans were no doubt considered dispensable, but they were also held to be despicable, dishonorable villains.  The two questions that keep coming up for me are:

1.  Have we achieved anything in the intervening 10 years toward helping the terrorists see that we are not all despicable, dishonorable villains?
2.  How close are we, as a divided nation, to convincing ourselves that our political opponents are themselves despicable, dishonorable villains?

Kwan Yin, Goddess of Compassion

I'm just saying....