What is a human life worth? It sounds like a question meant for philosophers and those late night deep talks with your friends when you’re all edible high and you’ve gotten past the shallow stuff. Instead, it’s a question that permeates all of our decisions, on both a personal and societal level.
Most of the problems that are growing at alarming rates and actually threatening the well being of the planet and our species began as an empathy problem. Environmentally, we have scientists describing in irrefutable detail how we are doing permanent damage to the Earth that will kill generations of poor people, yet we are at a complete standstill. We have decided that anyone not lucky enough to be born in a first world country has a value, a worth, and that value combined is not enough to change our consumerist patterns. We allow men with profit driven goals to wage wars that are fought with the blood of young men and women who thought they were defending a country that cared about that, and we drop bombs seemingly without even taking a peak at who might be a casualty that day.
Watching the healthcare debates recently feels like being inside a twilight zone. It is astounding that even with constituents watching, politicians can make arguments about cost saving and entitlements to persuade the audience to believe that only certain people with certain incomes deserve health. We can look at our neighbors and family members and deem them unworthy of doing anything more than fighting for survival.
Capitalism has forced us to look at the world through a lens of self-serving value. Because everything in front of us has been given a cost, we are constantly determining if the cost of the thing in front of us is worth the value that it gives us. While this may work for shoes and restaurants, it gets a lot trickier when the thing is front of us is our mother, our coworker, our friend or a nameless and faceless foreigner with no cultural ties to us whatsoever. And once that lens is nice and snug, it’s a lot trickier to set it to the side than we might think. We never put an actual price tag on top of grandma’s head, so we forget that we’re still determining if her inherent value to us is worth the time we sacrifice when we return one of her calls. It’s not a coincidence that the family unit is dissolving, after all. Family is much less valuable to us in 2017 than it has ever been before.
Are we proud of who we are? Are we okay with how we treat people? We pay taxes that are used to put spikes on alleyways where homeless people sleep at night instead of deeming every human being worthy of a safe place to sleep and using the greatest wealth the world has ever seen to provide it to them.
We were spoon fed a story about a system that says I cannot get mine, unless you do not have yours. We are submerged into the ideals of a starvation economy. There is not enough to go around, so you must take what you can, while you can. We can only pretend that we still have humanity for so long. And every time that we let someone convince us that this world doesn’t have enough for all of us to thrive, we let it come that much closer to death.
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