bilt2tumble: sugarkat:adamjk: the new york times, may 24, 2020 Okay. I mention my philosophy profe
bilt2tumble: sugarkat: adamjk: the new york times, may 24, 2020 Okay. I mention my philosophy professor and the lesson I learned in one of his Ethics lectures a lot, but the world keeps giving it meaning, so…. He asked us one hot summer day how to measure an evil. How do you measure the Holocaust? the genocide of the Native Americans? American slavery? a massacre? We, a bunch of kids whose brains hadn’t finished growing in yet, were mildly stumped. It wasn’t the number of the dead, we were told. Instead, we were told to imagine the following: You’re standing on a street corner. There is a line of people in front of you. One by one, they introduce themselves to you. One by one, you learn names and what they did, maybe a hobby, maybe how many siblings or kids or nephews they had. One by one, you heard about talents or hobbies, what they did on their last holiday. One by one, you meet those who were lost. This is how you measure an evil, my professor taught us. You measure not the number, but the individuals lost. Not just the names, but who they were, their connections to others. What is lost is an irreplaceable human being. The evil is measured not in the number, but in the who was lost. All of those whos matter. Every life listed above and listed on other pages mattered. Losing them hurts all of us. We lost nearly 100,000 irreplaceable human beings. This did not have to happen. That is the measure of the evil of “it’ll all just go away”. May their memories be a blessing to those who knew them and mourn them. May they Rest In Peace. May we never forget they were living, breathing human beings whose lives were important and mattered. May we never allow negligence, nepotism, greed, racism, ageism, ableism, and incompetence to do this to us again. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Reblogging again for ultra-relevant commentary. -- source link