The United States has witnessed more than one mass killing every week this year. So far this year there have been over 200 such incidents. Indeed, they are so common now that most of them go unremarked.
Mass shootings causing multiple injuries sometimes occur several times a day across that nation. Most of these are hardly even noted, except as footnotes in crime statistics.
How many people know, for example, that two people were killed and seventeen injured at a graduation ceremony shooting just two days ago? Only the most diehard news junkie, I suppose.
That situation is not much different over here, as the majority of knife crime goes unreported. The number of teenagers dying from knife wounds has reached such a high that the horror no longer seems to stir much emotion amongst social commentators at all.
It seems that we’ve become so accustomed to commonplace violence that we’re almost completely desensitized to it. Rather we just shrug our shoulders and carry on, refusing to be outraged until commanded to be so.
From time to time, we may all express revulsion for a crime which seems particularly heinous, standing in solidarity with the victims, or even an entire nation. But the rest of the time, we will just look the other way.
Who dares take a stand, protesting our indifference to lives needlessly lost? Who will remind us that all life is sacred? Who will recall that to save one life is as if to save all of humanity? Who will mourn the multitude of nameless victims, whose deaths could not stir us at all?
When life becomes this cheap, we have definitely lost our way. May God help us.
Last modified: 8 June 2023
