Do we matter as individuals?

There is a paradox about individual life. That someone can die but everything goes on the same. So it seems an individual life is not important and yet if we said this of every individual we would be finding that nothing is important. So the paradox is that we are very important and at the same time we are not important

When we lose someone we love we suffer the agony of pain and grief and we know that our world has changed dramatically and can never be the same again and yet for most of the people in the world this is not true it doesn’t matter to them.

Anyway that’s fortunate because if we had to grieve for every human being who died we would never stop grieving for a moment.

We ourselves matter to some other people but also because we are part of the human race and if nobody matters then life would be meaningless

But we only grieve deeply for those we know and yet with a modern news media we learn about the terrible suffering going on in other parts of the world and it seems that we can also grieve for those people who died today the same day that my sister died.

And  death is necessary. Like leaves fall from the tree and become part of the soil eventually from which new trees will grow or flowers.

If only we did not have blood:if only we could fall like a flower and gently become dust but we have not green sap but we have red blood and when we are wounded  we bleed. And it’s a terrible thing to see

And a lot of blood is being shed today all over the world in places where it just not seen necessary.

The reasons for allowing other people to be killed don’t seem good enough. What reason could be good enough?

Well, we might have thought it was a good idea if someone had killed Hitler in 1933 or at any time during his  reign of Terror

But even then there would have been arguments about whether a human being could take such a decision and about another person

Taking even one life is a very serious event.

That’s why we pretend that certain groups of people are not really human so it could racially based for it could be that certain children born with certain defects will be better off dead. It wasn’t just the Nazis thought that.

Well we saw the horrors of their path.

Everyone is of value.

That’s why it’s wrong to treat the poor and the disabled with cruelty.

In Victorian times they said that the children in the working class didn’t feel the cold that’s why they didn’t wear shoes because they didn’t feel the cold.

The fact that their parents couldn’t afford shoes for them was ignored. This is of course the defense mechanism of denial.

We all use these defences at times. Especially when it serves our interest so the wealthy could enjoy their wealth because the poor don’t need shoes, a good dinner, decent housing.

Just like animals have been treated a lot of the time but animals are not human beings and it’s far worse to treat human beings that way

Unfortunately it seems that the people in power don’t have this mentality on the whole. They want to become rich and they want their friends to become rich and if there’s a few pennies left after that then give it to the disabled as long as you’re absolutely sure that they are really disabled and not just faking it